MODERN  AMERICAN  WRITERS 

THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 


•The  Men  Who  Make 
Our  Novels  • 


BY 
GEORGE  GORDON 


NEW  YORK 

MOFFAT,  YARD  &  COMPANY 
1919 


COPYRIGHT,  1919, 

BY 
MOFFAT,  YARD  &  COMPANY 


First  printing June  5,  1919 

Second  printing August  11, 1919 


ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

To  the  following  publishers,  whose  co-operation 
made  possible  the  writing  of  this  book,  the  author 
makes  grateful  acknowledgment : 

The  Century  Company;  Dodd,  Mead  &  Company; 
George  H.  Doran  Company;  Doubleday,  Page  &  Com 
pany;  E.  P.  Dutton  &  Company;  Harper  &  Brothers; 
Henry  Holt  &  Company;  Houghton,  Mifflin  &  Com 
pany;  Alfred  A.  Knopf;  John  Lane  Company;  J.  B. 
Lippincott  Company;  Little,  Brown  &  Company; 
Robert  McBride  &  Company;  The  Macmillan  Com 
pany;  Moffat,  Yard  &  Company;  G.  P.  Putnam's 
Sons;  Charles  Scribner's  Sons;  Small,  Maynard  & 
Company;  Frederick  A.  Stokes  Company. 

In  order  that  this  book  might  be  published  on 
schedule  time,  the  chapters  on  Peter  B.  Kyne,  Zane 
Grey,  Thomas  Dixon  and  Basil  King  were  prepared 
by  Mr.  Howard  Willard  Cook,  editor  of  the  American 
Writers  Series.  There  has  been  no  attempt  on  Mr. 
Cook's  part  to  make  these  chapters  critical.  They  are 
presentations  of  biographical  fact.  The  authors  either 
were  in  Europe,  engaged  in  war  work,  or  in  some  way 
inaccessible  to  Mr.  Gordon.  These  chapters  embody 
Mr.  Cook's  idea  of  presentation,  rather  than  criticism 
in  the  series. 

454243 


IN  LIEU  OF  A  PREFACE 

"All  books  should  have  a  preface,  to  tell  what  they 
are  about  and  why  they  were  written,"  says  Mr. 
Arthur  Bullard,  in  the  opening  sentence  of  his  first 
novel,  A  Man's  World;  continuing,  "This  book  is 
about  myself." 

As  is  usual  with  books  and  prefaces  alike,  since  no 
man  can  escape  the  prison  of  his  personality  to  view 
the  world  with  any  eyes  but  his  own;  we  cannot,  like 
that  Tiresias  cited  by  Monsieur  France,  be  men  and 
at  the  same  time  have  memories  of  having  been  women. 

The  present  volume,  presumably  dealing  with  cer 
tain  of  those  who  make  novels,  was  written  on  de 
mand,  and  is,  for  the  most  part,  concerned  with  the 
life  and  opinions  of  George  Gordon.  For  this  reason, 
despite  Mr.  Bullard's  frank  invitation,  I  am  loathe  to 
add  (to  so  much)  a  preface  on  him.  Rather  am  I 
of  the  opinion  of  the  author  who  demurred  when  the 
first  John  Murray  demanded  a  preface  to  his  book. 
A  preface  (he  said)  always  put  him  in  mind  of  Ham 
let's  exclamation  to  the  tardy  player,  "Leave  thy  most 
damnable  faces,  and  begin !" 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  I  PAOB 

^•William  Dean  Howells i 

CHAPTER  II 

Booth  Tarkington n 

CHAPTER  in 
William  Allen  White 19 

CHAPTER  IV 

Ernest  Poole 27 

CHAPTER  V 

Joseph  Hergesheimer 33 

CHAPTER  VI 

Rupert  Hughes 41 

CHAPTER  VII 

Winston  Churchill 53 

CHAPTER  VIII 

Theodore  Dreiser 58 

CHAPTER  IX 

Meredith  Nicholson 64 

CHAPTER  X 

Samuel  H.  Adams 69 

Y 


vi  TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  XI  PACE 


Hamlin  Garland 


CHAPTER   XII 

Stewart  Edward  White    ..........      80 

CHAPTER  XIII 

Samuel  Merwin     ............      g,- 

CHAPTER   XIV 

Allan  UpdegraJ/         ...........      p2 

CHAPTER  XV 

Rex  Ellingwood  Beach    .......... 


CHAPTER   XVI 

Upton  Sinclair      ............     IOI 

CHAPTER   XVII 

Henry  Blake  Fuller    ...........     jo 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

James  Branch  Cabell      ..........     113 

CHAPTER  XIX 

Robert  W.  Chambers  ...........     119 

CHAPTER  XX 

Edward  Lucas  White      ..........     124 

CHAPTER  XXI 

Newton  A  .  Fuessle     ...........     131 

CHAPTER   XXII 

Emerson  Hough     ............     140 

CHAPTER  XXIII 

Thomas  Nelson  Page      ..........      145 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS  vii 

CHAPTER  XXIV  PAGB 

Robert  Herrick 148 

CHAPTER  XXV 

Harold  MacGrath 155 

CHAPTER  XXVI 

Peter  Clark  Macfarlane 159 

CHAPTER  XXVTI 

Harry  Leon  Wilson 162 

CHAPTER  XXVIII 

Owen  Wister 168 

CHAPTER  XXIX 

Henry  Sydnor  Harrison 175 

CHAPTER  XXX 

Joseph  C.  Lincoln 179 

CHAPTER  XXXI 

Freeman  Tilden 185 

CHAPTER  XXXII 

Louis  Joseph  Vance 190 

CHAPTER  XXXIII 

Harold  Bell  Wright 194 

CHAPTER  XXXIV 

Elias  Tobenkin 198 

CHAPTER  XXXV 

Arthur  Bullard 205 

CHAPTER  XXXVI 

Joseph  Anthony 208 


viii  TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  XXXVH  FACE 

Owen  McMahon  Johnson 214 

CHAPTER  XXXVni 

James  Lane  Allen 218 

CHAPTER  XXXIX 

Sinclair  Lewis 223 

CHAPTER  XL 

Hermann  Hagedorn,  Jr 228 

CHAPTER  XLI 

Sherwood  Anderson 234 

CHAPTER  XLH 

George  Barr  McCutcheon 239 

CHAPTER  XLIII 

Zane  Grey 244 

CHAPTER  XLIV 

Thomas  Dixon 249 

CHAPTER  XLV 

Basil  King 253 

CHAPTER  XLVI 

Peter  B.  Kyne 255 

CHAPTER  XLVH 

E.  W.  Howe 257 


THE 
MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 


CHAPTER  I 

WILLIAM    DEAN    HOWELLS 

In  a  review  of  Mr.  Gilbert  K.  Chesterton's  Bernard 
Shaw,  Mr.  Shaw  said  of  himself:  "Like  all  men,  I 
play  many  parts,  and  none  of  them  is  more  or  less 
real  than  the  other.  .  .  .  I  am  a  soul  of  infinite  worth, 
I  am,  in  short,  not  only  what  I  can  make  out  of  my 
self,  which  varies  greatly  from  hour  to  hour,  and 
emergency  to  emergency,  but  what  you  can  see  in 
me."  And  elsewhere,  in  the  Preface  to  Three  Plays 
for  Puritans:  "Like  all  dramatists  and  mimes  of 
genuine  vocation,  I  am  a  natural-born  mountebank." 

All  this  being  true,  a  whole  library  has  been  written 
about  Mr.  Shaw  and  what  different  people  in  different 
parts  of  the  world  see  in  him.  He  is  interesting,  he 
is  amusing,  he  is  frank — divertingly  so;  he  is  ingeni 
ous,  witty,  earnest — he  is,  I  would  swear  to  it,  "a 
soul  of  infinite  worth,"  playing  many  parts. 

But  of  how  many  men  could  this  be  said?  You 
may  take  my  word  for  it,  not  of  those  who  make  our 
novels. 


2     THE  MEN  WHGVMAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

Yet  there  is  a  belief  Abroad,  voiced  by  Mr.  William 
Allen  White  in  the  final  chapter  of  his  In  Our  Town, 
that  "every  human  life,  if  one  could  know  it  well  and 
translate  it  into  language,  has  in  it  the  making  of  a 
great  story."  I  would  ask  of  Mr.  White  the  number 
of  human  lives  of  which  even  God  has  failed  to  make 
a  great  story?  They  are  drab,  with  an  unending 
round  of  slack  and  futile  toil  as  like  one  another  as 
two  blades  of  grass — but  as  surely  created  by  Him 
as  the  infinite  sands  of  the  desert  or  the  far-fliing  stars 
that,  having  no  atmosphere,  are  uninhabited. 

"It  is  because  we  are  blind/'  says  Mr.  White,  "that 
we  pass  men  and  women  around  us,  heedless  of  the 
tragic  quality  of  their  lives." 

It  is  nothing  of  the  sort.  I  am  no  more  blind  than 
is  Mr.  White.  The  tragic  quality  of  the  lives  of  the 
men  and  women  around  me  is  bathos  compared  to 
the  great  tragedies  of  literature.  Time  is  limited. 
The  world  is  flooded  with  such  stories  as  my  neigh 
bor's  life  would  make — Heaven  forbid  that  he  too 
should  take  to  writing,  translating  his  miseries  into 
language.  Let's  have  done  with  this  sentimental 
twaddle.  Mr.  White  knows  very  well  that,  in  order 
to  make  his  characters  live  with  a  reality  not  bor 
rowed  from  the  mere  acts  of  everyday — a  lifting  of 
the  hand,  a  stifled  yawn,  a  drinking  of  water — he 
must  create  them  out  of  his  imagination,  taking  a 
dozen  or  more  of  those  about  him  to  make  one  lay- 
figure  of  romance. 

What  is  the  first  requirement  of  a  novelist?  Put  to 
a  jury  of  average  discrimination,  James  Branch  Cabell 
says,  that  question  would  probably  result  in  a  hung 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  3 

jury.  It  probably  would;  one  saying  "A  publisher," 
others  "Original  ideas/'  But  had  I  the  matter  in  hand, 
the  picking  and  choosing  of  those  who  are  to  write  our 
novels,  I  should  insist  that  they  be  creatures  of  infinite 
worth,  capable  of  playing  many  parts,  mountebanks — 
and  I  would  write  of  them  a  book  that  should  make 
the  rafters  ring. 

But  all  this  is  a  vain  dreaming.  We  flatter  our 
selves  that  our  lives  are  interesting — and  Mr.  White 
smiles  benignly,  blessing  us  as  little  children — but  they 
are  not.  Not  even  to  us,  if  I  am  to  believe  those  Who 
Make  Our  Novels.  I  appealed  to  some  thirty  to  tell 
me  of  their  doings,  their  ways  of  work  and  play;  and 
the  answers  with  few  exceptions  came  in  diverse  in 
dividual  words:  There  is  nothing  to  tell.  Now  if  a 
man  can  make  nothing  out  of  himself  .  .  .  but  we  are 
here  to  make  something  of  ourselves,  for  the  joy  of 
nations  and  the  good  of  humanity. 

"There  is  a  deference  in  the  early  Mr.  Howells, 
particularly  toward  stuffy  Bostonians,"  a  diffidence 
which,  as  Mr.  Francis  Hackett  has  said,  "makes  one 
ache  for  him."  "It  is  good  for  the  literary  aspirant," 
Mr.  Howells  wrote  long  ago  in  that  quaint  volume,  A 
Boy's  Town,  "to  realize  very  early  that  he  is  but  one 
of  many,  for  the  vice  of  our  comparatively  virtuous 
craft  is  that  it  tends  to  make  each  of  us  imagine  him 
self  central,  if  not  sole.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  however, 
the  universe  does  not  revolve  around  any  one  of  us; 
we  make  our  circuit  of  the  sun  along  with  the  other 
inhabitants  of  the  earth,  a  planet  of  inferior  magni 
tude."  (But  if  the  other  inhabitants  of  the  earth  are 
clods,  must  we  needs  be?  Man  was  given  speech  to 


4     THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

speak. )  "The  thing  we  strive  for  is  recognition/'  con 
tinued  Mr.  Howells,  "but  when  this  comes  it  is  apt  to 
turn  our  heads.  I  should  say,  then,  that  it  was  better 
it  should  not  come  in  a  great  glare  and  a  loud  shout 
all  at  once,  but  should  steal  slowly  upon  us,  ray  by 
ray,  breath  by  breath.'*  Better  for  us,  perhaps.  And 
for  those  who  would  save  their  skins  and  their  pride 
whole,  doubtless,  all  this  is  very  good  counsel.  But  is  it 
better  for  the  world?  Surely,  Mr.  Howells  has  been 
too  reticent.  For  himself,  while  praising  others,  he  has 
claimed  nothing.  And  he  has,  therefore,  been  almost 
lost  to  American  literature.  "He  is  the  one  American 
figure,"  as  Mr.  Hackett  has  pointed  out,  "on  whom 
literary  criticism  has  failed  to  focus  as  it  should,  and 
from  whose  large  intentions  and  richly  freighted  per 
formances  too  few  national  writers  have  renewed 
themselves."  And  I  think  that  he,  in  his  modesty,  is 
himself  largely  to  blame  for  this  neglect.  For  I  be 
lieve,  with  M.  Anatole  France,  that  it  is  the  duty  of 
the  man  with  a  message  to  present  that  message  to  the 
world — and  to  call  attention  to  it.  It  is  only  the  man 
who  has  no  message,  as  Mr.  Shaw  said  in  his  preface 
on  Brieux,  that  will  not  beat  a  drum  before  his  booth. 
What  if  Colonel  Roosevelt  had  hid  his  light  beneath 
a  bushel  ? 

Mr.  Howells  is  invariably  spoken  of  with  respect, 
and  yet,  save  in  the  older  generation,  that  respect  is 
not  dowered  with  affection.  He  is  eulogized,  honored, 
looked  up  to — but  he  is  seldom  treated  as  a  living 
force.  The  world  moves  upon  its  radical  way,  doffing 
its  hat,  but  passing  with  scarce  a  break  in  its  stride. 
The  task  of  interpreting  Mr.  Howells  still  waits.  Gay, 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  5 

happy  books  are  written  about  Mr.  Tarkington;  the 
brilliant  Miss  West  clears  the  air  about  Henry  James 
that  we  may  see  him  plain — but  only  the  student  (Mr. 
Alexander  Harvey)  discusses  Mr.  Howells.  Yet  I 
was  warned,  "Don't  fail  to  read  A  Modern  Instance, 
the  grace  and  precision  and  truth  of  that  work  make 
it  one  of  the  immortals."  Yet,  ages  ago,  James  Rus 
sell  Lowell  said  that  Mr.  Howells  "is  one  of  the  chief 
honors  of  our  literature."  "Yet  Mr.  Howells  is  monot 
onously  hymned  as  the  "Dean  of  American  Letters," 
until  the  phrase  rings  in  the  ears  like  a  street  ballad. 
Who  is  at  fault  ? 

Mark  Twain  said  of  him:  "For  forty  years  his 
English  has  been  a  continual  delight  and  astonishment. 
In  the  sustained  exhibition  of  certain  qualities — clear 
ness,  compression,  verbal  exactness,  and  unforced  and 
seemingly  unconscious  felicity  of  phrasing — he  is,  in 
my  belief,  without  his  peer  in  the  English-writing 
world.  Sustained — I  entrench  myself  behind  that  pro 
tecting  word.  There  are  others  who  exhibit  these  great 
qualities  as  greatly  as  does  he,  but  only  by  intervalled 
distributions  of  moonlight  with  stretches  of  veiled  and 
dimmer  landscape  between:  whereas  Howells'  moon 
sails  cloudless  skies  all  night,  and  all  the  nights.  .  .  . 

"There  is  another  thing  which  is  contentingly 
noticeable  in  Mr.  Howells'  books.  That  is  to  say  his 
'stage  directions/  .  .  .  Some  authors  overdo  the  stage 
directions.  .  .  .  Other  authors  .  .  .  have  nothing  in 
stock  but  a  cigar,  a  laugh,  a  blush,  and  a  bursting  into 
tears.  .  .  .  They  say : 

1 '.  .  .  replied  Alfred,  flipping  the  ash  from  his 
cigar/  (This  explains  nothing;  it  only  wastes  space.) 


6     THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

" '.  .  .  responded  Richard  with  a  laugh/  (There 
is  nothing  to  laugh  at ;  there  never  is.  The  writer  puts 
it  in  from  force  of  habit — automatically;  he  is  paying 
no  attention  to  his  work  or  he  would  see  there  is 
nothing  to  laugh  at.) 

" '.  .  .  murmured  Gladys,  blushing/  This  poor 
old  shopworn  blush  is  a  tiresome  thing.  We  get  so 
we  would  rather  Gladys  would  fall  out  of  the  book 
and  break  her  neck  than  do  it  again.  ...  In  a  little 
while  we  hate  her,  just  as  we  do  Richard.  .  .  .  But  I 
am  friendly  to  Mr.  Howells'  stage  directions,  more 
friendly  than  to  any  one's,  I  think.  They  are  done 
with  a  competent  and  discriminating  art,  are  faithful 
to  the  requirements  of  a  stage-direction's  proper  and 
lawful  office  which  is  to  inform.  Sometimes  they  con 
vey  a  scene  and  its  conditions  so  well  that  I  believe  I 
could  see  the  scene  and  get  the  spirit  and  meaning  of 
the  accompanying  dialogue  if  some  one  would  read 
merely  the  stage  directions  to  me  and  leave  out  all 
the  talk.  For  instance,  a  scene  like  this,  from  The 
Undiscovered  County : 

'*'...  And  she  laid  her  arms  with  a  beseeching 
gesture  on  her  father's  shoulder/ 

"  '.  .  .  she  answered,  following  his  gesture  with  a 
glance/ 

"  '.  .  .  she  asked,  laughing  nervously/ 

"'.  .  .  she  asked,  turning  swiftly  upon  him  that 
strange,  searching  glance/ 

" '.  .  .  she  reluctantly  admitted/ 

"  'But  her  voice  died  wearily  away,  and  she  stood 
looking  into  his  face  with  puzzled  entreaty !' 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  7 

"Mr.  Howells  does  not  repeat  his  forms,  and  does 
not  need  to:  he  can  invent  fresh  ones  without  limit." 

One  of  the  best  of  essays  on  Mr.  Howells  is  that  by 
Miss  Edith  Wyatt,  from  which  I  quote  these  several 
paragraphs  by  Mark  Twain. 

Mr.  Howells'  early  novels  were  scarcely  more  than 
sketches  of  travel.  It  was  not  until  The  Undiscovered 
County  that  he  reached  the  full  stature  of  his  strength. 
He  has  published  upwards  of  a  hundred  volumes — 
thirty-odd  novels,  farces,  comedies,  criticism,  reminis 
cence,  verse — and  in  Silas  Lapham — Mr.  Harvey  gives 
it  as  his  opinion  "that  from  the  standpoint  of  litera 
ture  regarded  as  a  fine  art,  The  Rise  of  Silas  Lapham 
is  the  greatest  novel  ever  written.  ...  In  the  matter 
of  form,  structure,  style,  whatever  we  choose  to  call 
that  part  of  a  novelist's  equipment  which  reveals  him 
as  an  artist,  this  tale  of  the  Laphams  is  more  finished 
than  the  masterpieces  of  Flaubert." 

And  Mr.  Howells  has  much  in  common  with  Flau 
bert.  Asked  once  if  he  had  ever  lost  himself  in  his 
work,  he  replied:  "Never.  The  essence  of  achieve 
ment  is  to  keep  outside,  to  be  entirely  dispassionate,  as 
a  sculptor  must  be  moulding  his  clay."  As  Pygmalion, 
adoring  his  marble  girl,  never  was — as  Flaubert,  to 
(I  think)  the  great  hurt  of  his  work,  tried  to  be — as 
is  absolutely  impossible:  A  Modern  Instance  proves 
it  impossible.  There  Mr.  Howells  takes  sides  against 
his  villain  and  stigmatizes  his  "corrupt  nature,"  until 
(as  Mr.  Hacket  has  said)  the  book  becomes,  actually 
is,  a  morality. 

Mr.  Howells  was  born  at  Martins  Ferry,  Ohio,  on 


8     THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

March  i,  1837,  the  son  of  William  Cooper  Howells, 
a  country  printer  and  editor,  whose  library  was  large 
and  well  chosen  at  the  time.  In  this  library  Mr.  How- 
ells  obtained  most  of  his  education — beyond  the  three 
R's  of  the  country  town  school-house.  He  read  almost 
anything  and  everything  that  came  to  hand,  specializ 
ing  in  poetry,  even  going  so  far  as  to  write  a  little 
poetry  and  set  it  up  in  type — to  be  printed  ?  The  story 
does  not  go  that  far. 

In  1851  the  family  fortunes  met  with  disaster — as 
they  say  in  small  towns — and  Mr.  Howells  went  away 
to  work  as  compositor  on  the  Ohio  State  Journal,  for 
four  dollars  a  week,  soon  graduating  into  journalism 
and  at  twenty-two  becoming  news  editor.  His  first 
published  work,  Poems  of  Two  Friends,  written  with 
John  J.  Platt,  appeared  in  1860 — and  about  this  time 
he  began  to  contribute  to  the  Atlantic  Monthly,  then 
just  founded.  The  same  year  he  also  wrote  a  cam 
paign  biography  of  Abraham  Lincoln.  For  this  he 
was  appointed  American  Consul  at  Venice,  where  he 
remained  until  1865,  studying  the  Italian  language  and 
its  literature.  On  his  return  to  the  United  States  he 
wrote  for  the  New  York  Tribune  and  the  Nation,  and 
in  1866  he  became  assistant  editor  of  the  Atlantic, 
becoming  editor  six  years  later.  Then  for  a  while  he 
contributed  to  Harper's,  was  editor  of  the  Cosmopoli 
tan,  and  in  1900  returned  to  Harper's  to  conduct  the 
Editor's  Easy  Chair. 

He  is  to-day,  despite  Mr.  Cabell's  choice  of  Mr. 
Booth  Tarkington,  the  chief  honor  of  our  literature 
...  his  day  done,  certainly,  but  his  mark  placed  high 
for  my  generation  to  study. 


WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS  9 

His  PUBLISHED  WORKS  INCLUDE: 

Venetian  Life,  A  Chance  Acquaintance,  The  Undis 
covered  Country,  A  Modern  Instance,  A  Woman's 
Reason,  The  Rise  of  Silas  Lapham,  A  Hazard  of  New 
Fortunes,  The  Sleeping  Car  and  Other  Farces,  My 
Literary  Passions,  The  Landlord  at  Lion's  Head,  The 
Kentons,  A  Counterfeit  Presentment,  A  Fearful  Re 
sponsibility,  Three  Villages,  A  Little  Girl  among  the 
Old  Masters,  Indian  Summer,  April  Hopes,  The  Mouse 
Trap,  and  Other  Farces,  An  Imperative  Duty,  The 
Albany  Depot,  The  Quality  of  Mercy,  A  Little  Swiss 
Journey,  Christmas  Every  Day,  The  Unexpected 
Guests,  The  World  of  Chance,  The  Coast  of  Bohemia, 
An  Open-Eyed  Conspiracy,  Miss  Bellard's  Inspira 
tion,  The  Leatherwood  God,  Poems  of  Two  Friends, 
Life  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  A  Foregone  Conclusion, 
Italian  Journeys,  Suburban  Sketches,  No  Love  Lost, 
Their  Wedding  Journey,  Out  of  the  Question,  Life  of 
Rutherford  B.  Hayes,  The  Lady  of  the  Aroostook, 
Dr.  Breen's  Practice,  Tuscan  Cities,  The  Minister's 
Charge,  Modern  Italian  Poets,  Annie  Kilburn,  The 
Shadow  of  a  Dream,  A  Boy's  Town,  Criticism  and 
Fiction,  The  Letter  of  Introduction,  A  Traveler  from 
Altruria,  The  Day  of  Their  Wedding,  A  Parting  and 
a  Meeting,  Impressions  and  Experiences,  Stops  of 
Various  Quills,  Stories  cf  Ohio,  The  Story  of  a  Play, 
Ragged  Lady,  The  Silver  Wedding  Journey,  Literary 
Friends  and  Acquaintances,  A  Pair  of  Patient  Loiters, 
Heroines  of  Fiction,  Literature  and  Life,  The  Flight 
of  Pony  Baker,  Questionable  Shapes,  London  Films, 
Certain  Delightful  English  Towns,  Between  the  Dark 


io  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

and  the  Daylight,  Through  the  Eye  of  the  Needle, 
Fennel  and  Rue,  The  Mother  and  the  Father,  Seven 
English  Cities,  New  Leaf  Mills,  The  Seen  and  the 
Unseen  at  Stratford-on-Avon,  Years  of  My  Youth. 


CHAPTER  II 

NEWTON    BOOTH    TARKINGTON 

"I  do  not  proffer  the  volume  as  capillarity  soothing," 
Wrote  Mr.  Cabell,  when  forwarding  Beyond  Life, 
Dizain  des  Demiurges  (1919),  to  me,  "nor,  certainly, 
as  an  assistant  to  you  in  writing  about  any  novelist. 
My  motive,  possibly,  is  a  desire  to  empoison  your 
wholesome  view  of  things  in  general.  I  cannot  say." 

I  did  not  read  Beyond  Life — essays  written  in  the 
third  person  concerning  books:  "a  good  book  is  the 
precious  life-blood  of  a  master-spirit,  embalmed  and 
treasured  up  on  purpose  to  a  life  beyond  life" — I  did 
not  read  with  any  malice  aforethought  nor,  certainly, 
with  any  intent  to  steal;  but  possibly  because  when  I 
read,  I  take  lessons  in  writing,  lifting  a  phrase  here 
and  there  to  store  away  in  memory,  I  must  make  use 
of  Mr.  Cabell  and  his  conclusions,  though  (and  the 
danger  appears  real)  the  poison  of  quotation  spread 
to  infect  my  wholesale  review  of  things  in  general. 
I  find  myself  too  often  in  agreement  with  Mr.  Cabell 
to  pass  him  by  without  some  courtesy  of  recognition — 
and  in  especial  as  regards  Mr.  Booth  Tarkington. 

For  if,  as  Stevenson  declared,  the  fairies  were  tipsy 
at  Mr.  Kipling's  christening,  then,  as  Mr.  Cabell  is 
fain  to  believe,  "at  Mr.  Tarkington's  they  must  have 
been  in  the  last  stage  of  maudlin  generosity.  Poetic 

iz 


12   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

insight  they  gave  to  Mr.  Tarkington;  and  the  knack 
of  story  building;  and  all  their  own  authentic  elfin 
liveliness  of  fancy;  and  actually  perceptive  eyes,  by 
virtue  of  which  his  more  truly  Tarkingtonian  pages 
are  enriched  with  countless  happy  little  miracles  of 
observation;  and  the  dramatic  gift  of  contriving  and 
causing  to  move  convincingly  a  wide  variety  of  puppets 
in  nothing  resembling  the  puppet-master;  and  the  not 
uncommon  desire  to  'write/  with  just  enough  defi 
ciency  in  common-sense  to  make  him  willing  to  put 
up. with  the  laboriousness  of  writing  fairly  well.  In 
fine,  there  is  hardly  one  natural  endowment  requisite 
to  grace  in  a  creative  author  that  was  omitted  by  these 
inebriated  fairies.  And  to  all  this  Mr.  Tarkington  has 
since  added,  through  lonesome  and  grinding  toil,  an 
astounding  proficiency  at  the  indoor  sport  of  adroit 
verbal  expression.  No  living  manipulator  of  English 
employs  the  contents  of  his  dictionary  more  artfully 
or,  in  the  general  hackneyed  and  misleading  phrase,  has 
a  better  'style/ 

"No  less," — and  (with  Mr.  Cabell)  I  take  this  to 
be  "one  of  the  most  tragic  items  in  all  the  long  list 
of  misfortunes  which  have  befallen  American  litera 
ture,  .  .  .  the  loss  of  an  artist  demands  lamentation, 
even  when  he  commits  suicide" — "no  less,  for  many 
years  Mr.  Tarkington  has  been  writing  'best-sellers/ 
varied  every  once  in  a  while  by  something  that  was  a 
'best-seller'  in  nature  rather  than  performance.  His 
progress  has  been  from  the  position  of  a  formidable 
rival  of  the  late  Mr.  Charles  Major  (not  very  long  ago 
the  world-famous  author  of  a  story  entitled  When 
Knighthood  Was  in  Flower)  to  the  point  of  figuring 


NEWTON  BOOTH  TARKINGTON         13 

prominently  in  The  Saturday  Evening  Post.  So  that, 
upon  the  whole,  one  wonders  if  ere  this  the  fairies 
have  not  humored  their  protege  yet  further,  by  becom 
ing  Prohibitionists. 

"Mr.  Tarkington  has  published  nothing  that  does 
not  make  very  'pleasant'  reading.  He  has,  in  fact, 
re-written  the  quaint  legend,  that  virtue  and  honest 
worth  must  rise  inevitably  to  be  the  target  both  of 
rice-throwing  and  of  respectful  consideration  by  the 
bank  cashier,  as  indefatigably  as  human  optimism  and 
the  endurance  of  the  human  wrist  would  reasonably 
permit.  For  the  rest,  his  plots  are  the  sort  of  thing 
that  makes  criticism  seem  cruel." 

As  indeed — for  all  such  gracious  exceptions  as  Mr. 
Cabell — it  too  often  is.  For  instance,  Mr.  Frederick 
Tabor  Cooper,  writing  in  1911,  insisted  that  Monsieur 
Beaucaire  "immediately,  once  and  for  all,  defined  Mr. 
Tarkington's  proper  sphere  and  limitations,  proved 
him  one  of  those  writers  whose  stories,  whenever  and 
wherever  laid,  should  carry  with  them  something  of 
the  'once  upon  a  time'  atmosphere, — the  fictional  at 
mosphere  of  the  story  that  aims  frankly  to  entertain." 
Monsieur  Beaucaire  (says  Mr.  Cooper,  too  anxious  to 
prove  a  point)  "reduced  at  once  to  an  absurdity  the 
bare  idea  of  Mr.  Tarkington's  ever  again  attempting 
to  write  a  novel  opening  with  such  prosaic  actuality 
as  'There  is  a  fertile  stretch  of  flat  lands  in  Indiana 
where  unagrarian  Eastern  travelers,  glancing  from 
car-windows,  shudder  and  return  their  eyes  to  interior 
upholstery'  " — the  opening  of  The  Gentleman  from 
Indiana.  Mr.  Cooper,  of  course,  had  no  means  of 
foretelling  the  opening  of  The  Turmoil  (1915): 


14   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

'There  is  a  midland  city  in  the  heart  of  fair,  open 
country,  a  dirty  and  wonderful  city  nestling  dingily 
in  the  fog  of  its  own  smoke." 

Yet  it  is  true  that  there  is  a  certain  sameness  about 
all  of  Mr.  Tarkington's  stories.  Fault  has  been  found 
with  most  of  them  on  the  score  of  lack  of  plausibility. 
The  basis  of  practically  everything  he  has  written, 
down  to  The  Turmoil,  is  (as  Mr.  Holliday  has  pointed 
out)  "a  misunderstanding  of  one  kind  or  another,  of 
identity,  of  purpose,  of  character — and  in  repeated  in 
stances  this  misunderstanding  has  been  of  the  most 
elementary  sort,  that  of  mistaken  identity.  This 
charge,  however"  (to  quote  Mr.  Holliday  further), 
"really  goes  no  deeper  than  to  say  that,  like  many 
men  of  the  highest  gift,  which  he  has  in  fair  measure, 
imagination,  he  is  curiously  feeble  in  the  faculty  of 
invention.  He  is  no  Poe.  In  some  cases,  as  in  The 
Flirt,  splendid  as  character  study,  his  efforts  at  inven 
tion  in  the  surrounding  story  are  almost  childlike. 
Contrary  to  what  very  likely  we  have  been  wont  lightly 
to  suppose,  in  the  essence  of  his  talent,  the  play  is 
never  the  thing.  The  people  are  the  thing,  and  the 
freshness  of  the  art  with  which  the  thrice-told  tale  is 
told." 

But,  as  Mr.  Cabell  has  it,  though  "his  ventriloquism 
is  startling  in  its  excellence,  his  marionettes,  under  the 
most  life-like  of  exteriors,  have  either  hearts  of  gold 
or  entrails  of  sawdust;  there  is  no  medium;  and  as 
touches  their  behavior,  all  the  Tarkingtonian  puppets 
'form  themselves'  after  the  example  of  the  not  un- 
famous  young  person  who  had  a  curl  in  the  middle 
of  her  forehead.  And  Mr.  Tarkington's  auctorial 


NEWTON  BOOTH  TARKINGTON        15 

philosophy  was  summed  up  long  ago,  in  The  Gentle 
man  from  Indiana:  'Look,'  said  Helen.  'Aren't  they 
good,  the  dear  people?' — The  beautiful  people/  he 
answered. 

"Now  this,  precisely  this,  Mr.  Tarkington  has  been 
answering  ever  since  to  every  riddle  of  life.  .  .  .  Yet 
to  some  carping  few  of  us  (who  read  the  daily  papers) 
this  sentiment  now  seems  peculiarly  anachronistic  and 
irrational.  The  world  to  us  is  not  very  strikingly 
suggestive  of  a  cosmic  gumdrop  variegated  by  oceans 
of  molasses:  we  dispute  if  Omnipotence  was  ever,  at 
any  time,  a  confectioner's  apprentice.  ...  So  we  re 
member  Mr.  Tarkington' s  own  story  of  Lukens  and 
the  advice  therein,  when  dealing  with  a  popular  novel 
ist,  to  'treat  him  with  silent  contempt  or  a  brick/  And 
we  reflect  that  Mr.  Tarkington  is  certainly  not  a  person 
to  be  treated  with  silent  contempt.  .  .  .  For  Mr.  Tark 
ington  has  not  mere  talent  but  an  uncontrollable  wiz 
ardry  that  defies  concealment,  even  by  the  livery  of  a 
popular  novelist.  .  .  .  And  in  fine,  it  all  comes  back 
to  this:  to  write  'best-sellers'  is  by  ordinary  a  harm 
less  and  very  often  a  philanthropic  performance;  but 
in  Mr.  Tarkington's  case  it  is  a  misappropriation  of 
funds.  .  .  .  The  fact  remains  that  out  of  forty-nine 
years  of  living  Mr.  Tarkington  has  thus  far  given  us 
only  Seventeen.  Nor  would  this  matter  were  Mr. 
Tarkington  a  Barclay  or  a  Harrison,  or  even  the  mental 
and  artistic  equal  of  the  trio's  far  more  popular  rival, 
Mr.  Harold  Bell  Wright.  But  Mr.  Tarkington  had 
genius.  That  is  even  more  tragic  than  the  'pleasant* 
ending  of  The  Magnificent  Ambersons" 

Mr.  Tarkington  had  genius.    And  it  is  unfortunate 


16   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

that  he  should  be,  as  a  rule,  so  sentimentally  interested. 
He  is  as  familiar  with  the  people,  with  the  scene,  with 
the  life  of  which  he  writes  as  it  is  humanly  possible 
to  be.  "He  knows,"  as  Mr.  Hackett  has  said,  review 
ing  The  Magnificent  Amber  sons,  "the  great  ball  where 
the  old  grand-uncle  distresses  the  college  Hyperion; 
he  knows  the  age  of  serenade  and  New  Year's  party, 
the  age  of  tandems  and  surreys  and  cutters  and  'git  a 
hoss' ;  he  understands  the  household  ruled  by  a  benevo 
lent  despot,  with  a  son  and  his  stately  wife  that  only 
ask  an  embassy  as  their  plaything,  and  a  daughter  that 
is  content  with  an  unlimited  bank  account  and  another 
son,  the  man  with  the  light  touch  who  is  amused  to 
dabble  expensively  in  financiering — almost  nothing 
that  is  necessary  to  creating  a  study  of  this  American 
reality  is  lacking  in  Mr.  Tarkington  except  the  temper 
of  a  master  novelist."  And  that  he  will,  it  seems, 
never  have.  He  deals  more  kindly  with  his  characters 
than  ever  life  would. 

In  telling  how  his  first  novel  came  to  be  written,  he 
said:  "I'd  been  writing  short  stories  until  I  thought 
I  might  venture  a  bigger  job — so  I  did.  All  the  short 
stories,  including  Monsieur  Beaucaire,  had  been  re 
jected  by  several  magazines,  and  I  had  no  idea  that 
the  novel  would  get  into  print.  Of  course,  I  hoped  it 
might.  I'd  have  written  it  just  the  same  if  I'd  been 
sure  it  wouldn't.  Mr.  McClure  took  it.  It  was  The 
Gentleman  from  Indiana.  I  had  no  real  success  until 
I  struck  Indiana  subjects." 

Booth  Tarkington  was  born  in  Indianapolis,  July  29, 
1869.  He  is  a  descendant  of  the  Reverend  Thomas 
Hooker,  scholar  and  orator  of  Revolutionary  fame. 


NEWTON  BOOTH  TARKINGTON         17 

His  great-grandmother  was  that  Mary  Newton  who 
figures  as  a  beauty  in  the  Annals  of  Old  Salem.  His 
family  had  been  prominent  in  Indiana  for  three  gen 
erations.  He  was  himself  named  for  an  uncle,  New 
ton  Booth,  at  one  time  governor  of  California  and  a 
Senator  from  that  State.  His  father,  John  Stevenson 
Tarkington,  a  lawyer,  captain  132  Indiana  Infantry 
during  the  Civil  War,  member  of  the  State  legislature, 
judge  of  the  circuit  court,  has  given  the  leisure  of  later 
years  to  literature  and  has  published  two  books. 

Mr.  Tarkington  attended  Phillips  Exeter  Academy, 
entering  college  at  Purdue  and  transferring  to  Prince 
ton  as  a  Junior.  He  helped  to  revive,  and  was  for  a 
time  editor  of,  the  Princeton  Tiger;  he  contributed 
essays  to  the  Lit;  he  wrote  a  play  for  the  Triangle 
Club ;  and  was,  on  graduation,  voted  the  most  popular 
and  the  most  promising  man  in  the  class  of  '93.  (His 
first  tale  to  be  sold,  Cherry,  dealt  with  the  country 
round  about  Princeton  and  undergraduate  life  in  pre- 
Revolutionary  days.)  He  lives  to-day,  for  the  most 
part,  in  Indianapolis,  working  there,  rising  at  nine,  and 
hard  at  it  in  a  bath-robe  at  nine-thirty — sometimes 
locking  himself  in  for  two  or  three  days  running, 
sleeping  a  few  hours  in  the  night  on  a  couch,  eating 
as  little  as  possible.  And  yet  he  is  far  famed  on 
account  of  his  social  tact,  his  good  fellowship,  his  sing 
ing  of  Danny  1) e ever.  .  .  . 

The  same  old  Tark — just  watch  him  shy 
Like  hunted  thing,  and  hide,  if  let, 
Away  behind  his  cigarette 
When  "Danny  Deever"  is  the  cry. 


i8   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

Keep  up  the  call  and  by  and  by 

We'll  make  him  sing,  and  find  he's  yet 

The  same  old  Tark. 

THE  WORKS  OF  TARKINGTON  INCLUDE: 

The  Gentleman  from  Indiana  (1899),  Monsieur 
Beaucaire  (1900),  The  Two  Vanrevels  (1902), 
Cherry  (1903),  In  the  Arena  (1905),  The  Conquest 
of  Canaan  (1905),  The  Beautiful  Lady  (1905),  His 
Own  People  (1907),  Guest  of  Quesnay  (1908),  Beas- 
ley's  Christmas  Party  (1909),  Beauty  and  the  Jacobin 
(1911),  The  Flirt  (1913),  Penrod  (1914),  The  Tur 
moil  (1915),  Penrod  and  Sam  (1916),  Seventeen 
(1917),  The  Magnificent  Ambersons  (1918). 


CHAPTER  III 

WILLIAM  ALLEN   WHITE 

Because  his  are  initials  to  conjure  with,  I  quote 
F.  P.  A.  (Franklin  P.  Adams,  of  the  New  York 
Tribune)  to  introduce  the  author  of  God's  Puppets, 
short  long- stories  telling  of  life — men,  women,  and 
their  ways — in  Kansas: 

"Fiction  in  America  recovers  from  its  blight 
When  I  read  a  small-town  story  by  Old  Bill 
White.  .  .  ." 

Yet  Mr.  White  is  ignored  by  those  who  write  crit 
ically  in  books  concerning  what  is  euphemistically 
termed  American  Literature.  For  all  that,  Mr.  White 
is  (as  Mr.  Francis  Hackett  has  said,  as  In  the  Heart 
of  a  Fool  proves)  an  artist  with  words,  a  creator  of 
characters  that  live  without  undue  manipulation  or 
help  from  their  creator. 

And  he  is  as  naive  and  simple  as  a  child.  When 
asked  for  the  story  of  his  life,  he  was  quite  taken 
aback.  "I  would  rather  you  would  judge  from  my 
books,"  he  said.  "Every  writer  has  a  multiple  person 
ality  and  his  characters  represent  the  various  faces  of 
his  life.  You  can  get  the  dates  from  Who's  Who; 
you  can  get  something  from  my  picture" — that  of  a 
bucolic  Westerner,  a  hog-raiser — "but  not  much.  I 

19 


20   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

am  willing  to  be  judged  by  my  books.  I  suppose  that 
is  the  only  way  I  can  get  myself  across  the  chasm  from 
one  human  being  to  another  who  is  out  of  eye  reach 
...  I  may  possibly  be  in  New  York" — he  sailed  for 
Europe  early  in  December  to  attend  the  Peace  Con 
ference  as  a  reporter,  and  to  become  one  of  our  dele 
gates  to  the  meeting  with  the  Russian  leaders  scheduled 
for  Prince's  Island — "I  may  possibly  be  in  New  York 
and  if  you  could  come  up  there,  I  should  be  pleased 
to  talk  the  arm  off  of  you,  if  you  will  let  me.  But 
for  the  life  of  me  I  cannot  see  how  I  can  make  any 
headway  through  the  written  page" — this,  mind  you, 
from  the  man  who  wrote  The  Martial  Adventures  of 
Henry  and  Me,  autobiography  such  as  the  most  intro 
spective  could  not  achieve.  "I  really  want  to  help 
and  don't  desire  to  be  stand-offish,  but  I  cannot  focus 
any  light  upon  myself  from  my  inner  consciousness. 
.  .  .  Compared  to  my  instinctive  reticence  a  clam 
shouts  like  an  auctioneer.  ..." 

And  so  I  read  In  Our  Town  over  again  after  a 
lapse  of  years: — 

"Ours  is  a  little  town  in  that  part  of  the  country 
called  the  West  by  those  who  live  east  of  the  Alle- 
ghanies,  and  referred  to  lovingly  as  'back  East*  by 
those  who  dwell  west  of  the  Rockies.  It  is  a  country 
town  where,  as  the  song  goes,  'you  know  everybody 
and  they  all  know  you,'  and  the  country  newspaper 
is  the  social  clearing-house." 

In  that  town  (Emporia,  Kansas)  Mr.  White  was 
born,  February  10,  1868;  there  he  still  lives,  and  edits 
the  Gazette.  A  town  of  10,000  inhabitants — and  they 
all  know  Mr.  White.  When  his  first  long  novel  ap- 


WILLIAM  ALLEN  WHITE  21 

peared,  A  Certain  Rich  Man,  they  bought  2,500  copies. 
There,  in  1909,  on  his  return  from  Europe,  they  piled 
him  into  a  low-necked  hack,  such  as  kings  use  when 
they  show  themselves  to  their  people,  to  drive  through 
the  streets  in  triumph — it  was  (says  the  Kansas  City 
Star)  an  extraordinary  reception  which  greeted  him — 
it  resulted  in  a  quite  general  belief  in  his  A  Certain 
Rich  Man — the  Bookman  took  it  to  be  "a  book  very 
much  worth  while  reading" — and  it  is  ...  you  have 
my  word  for  it.  It  required  three  years  in  the  writing 
and  went  through  six  editions  in  a  month,  has  sold 
a  quarter  of  a  million  copies. 

When  it  came  to  the  actual  working  out  of  the 
story — the  idea  had  grown  out  of  an  enforced  leisure 
spent  at  Coronado  Beach  tossing  pebbles  into  the  sea — 
Mr.  White  went  up  into  the  mountains  of  Colorado 
where  he  established  himself  and  family  in  a  log  cabin 
and  set  up  a  tent  for  workshop.  "My  working  day 
was  supposed  to  begin  at  nine  o'clock  in  the  morning, 
but  the  truth  is  I  seldom  reached  the  tent  before  ten. 
Then  it  took  me  some  time  to  get  down  to  work.  From 
then  on  until  late  in  the  afternoon  I  would  sit  at  my 
typewriter,  chew  my  tongue,  and  pound  away.  Each 
night  I  read  to  my  wife  what  I  had  written  that  day 
and  Mrs.  White  would  criticize  it.  While  my  work 
was  red-hot  I  couldn't  get  any  perspective  on  it — each 
day's  installment  seemed  to  me  the  finest  literature  I 
had  ever  read.  She  didn't  always  agree  with  me. 
When  she  disapproved  of  anything  I  threw  it  away — 
after  a  row — and  rewrote  it." 

It  is  a  rattling  fine  yarn,  almost  as  fine  as  In  the 
Heart  of  a  Fool,  and  the  everlasting  moralizing,  the 


22  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

preaching  must  be  borne  with  as  it  is  borne  with  in 
Bunyan.  Why  Mr.  White,  living  in  the  most  moral 
community  in  all  the  world — which  our  middle-west 
most  surely  can  claim  to  be — should  be  so  obsessed 
with  a  sense  of  sin,  remains  one  of  those  riddles  that 
disturb  the  critic.  But  that  the  wicked  prosper  for  a 
certain  length  of  time  seems  to  have  dawned  on  Mr. 
White — and  he  would  prove  their  prosperity  that  van 
ity  of  which  a  greater  preacher  (and  a  greater  artist) 
than  ever  he  is  spoke  in  the  long  ago. 

But  his  moralizing  annoys  Mr.  Mencken,  that  Mr. 
Mencken  whom  I  find  quite  irresistible.  "Mr.  White/' 
he  says,  "shows  the  viewpoint  of  a  chautauqua  spell 
binder  and  the  manner  of  a  Methodist  evangelist.  .  .  . 
And  if  it  were  not  for  one  thing  I  should  be  tempted 
to  spit  on  my  hands  and  give  it  (In  the  Heart  of  a 
Fool)  such  a  slating  that  the  very  hinges  of  this  great 
family  periodical  (The  Smart  Set)  would  grow  white- 
hot.  .  .  .  That  thing,  that  insidious  dissuader,  is  an 
ineradicable  suspicion  that,  after  all,  the  book  is  abso 
lutely  American.  .  .  .  One  may  observe  this  sadly,  but 
it  is  rather  vain  to  rail  against  it.  .  .  ." 

Now  Mr.  White  has  not  merely  the  "view-point  of 
a  Chautauqua  spell-binder"  and  "the  manner  of  a 
Methodist  Evangelist,"  or  he  could  never  have  attained 
to  the  general  respect  of  a  reasonably  intelligent  audi 
ence — he  would  remain  simply  a  spell-binder,  a  Metho 
dist  Evangelist;  he  is  vastly  more.  True,  he  burst 
upon  us  in  1896  with  an  editorial,  reprinted  far  and 
wide,  asking  Whafs  the  Matter  with  Kansas?,  begging 
that  Kansas  raise  more  corn  and  less  hell — but  such 
lamentations  are  not,  necessarily,  the  mewlings  of  an 


WILLIAM  ALLEN  WHITE  23 

idiot — Jeremiah  is  proof  against  any  such  contention. 
Mr.  White  has  brave  notions — such  as  Ben  Jonson 
insisted  were  necessary  to  the  business  of  authorship — 
and  he  would  doubtless  improve  us  if  possible;  but 
he  also  improves  his  writing,  carefully  studying  his 
characters. 

Concerning  him,  the  Hon.  Victor  Murdock  has 
written : — 

"A  visitor  to  Emporia,  Kansas,  is  apt  to  find  Wil 
liam  Allen  White  in  one  of  four  activities — political, 
commercial,  literary  or  domestic.  These  activities  are 
unlike.  But  in  them  White  remains  the  same — that 
is  White. 

"Beginning  with  the  last — his  home  life.  He  gives 
himself  up  to  the  solid  comforts  of  domestic  happi 
ness.  There  is  nothing  about  him  to  indicate  that  he 
has  a  commercial  care,  or  a  political  interest  or  a 
literary  design.  He  takes  full  liberty  with  his  library, 
pulling  down  Kipling  or  Wells  and  scanning  a  sen 
tence  or  two  at  random  and  then  replacing  the  book 
with  no  sign  that  he  has  taken  anything  out  of  it. 
He  turns  on  the  talking-machine  and  plants  himself 
squarely  in  front  of  it — going  strong  for  the  Valkyrie, 
Rheingold  and  Schubert's  unfinished  symphony  and 
plunking  the  needle  back  on  some  particularly  favored 
phrase.  He  wanders  forth  with  his  family  into  the 
garden  and  notes,  without  particular  enthusiasm,  the 
progress  of  wistaria,  lilac  and  iris.  Back  again  in  the 
house,  he  edges  over  onto  the  piano  seat  and  tries  very 
softly  and  quite  beautifully  'Genevieve'  with  minor 
improvisations.  He  has  an  eye  to  the  kitchen  and  an 
adolescent  demand  as  to  the  nature  of  the  dessert. 


24   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

He  rises  a  degree  in  enthusiasm  over  the  business  of 
salad-fabrication,  and  wanders  back  into  the  library 
when  it  has  been  disposed  of.  Now  all  this  is  William 
Allen  White  at  home — but  it  is  without  the  identifying 
characteristic  which  marks  him  everywhere.  That 
identifying  characteristic  is  the  appearance  of  mental 
detachment  while  he  is  at  it.  One  cannot  too  surely 
charge  that  he  does  not  know  he  is  looking  at  the  iris> 
or  listening  to  the  Valkyrie  or  gloating  over  the  salad, 
but  one  carries  away  the  impression  that  he  is  doing 
these  things  somewhat  mechanically  and  that  his  real 
occupation  at  the  moment  is  some  tremendous  thinking 
in  the  center  of  an  isolated  mental  area,  safe  against 
all  manner  of  outside  invasion. 

"It  is  not  phlegm.  It  is  never  mistaken  for  phlegm 
in  White.  His  'quiescence  is  plainly  the  envelope  of  a 
prodigious  energy.  What  is  true  in  his  home  life  is 
true  in  his  other  activities — the  abstraction  carries 
through  and  marks  him  in  each. 

"He  loves  politics.  The  public  interest  is  his  pas 
sion.  Men  and  their  ambitions,  in  the  RAW,  fasci 
nate  him.  But  he  is  never  a  spectator.  He  is  always 
a  participant.  He  has  an  eager  hand  for  the  battle-ax, 
and  his  voice  is  clarion  with  a  battle-cry.  Always 
prominent  in  affairs  and  at  times  controlling,  there  is 
no  question  of  economics  that  does  not  hold  him  and 
no  infinitesimal  detail  of  personal  maneuver  that  calls 
in  vain  on  his  attention.  Like  almost  all  Kansas  poli 
ticians  of  this  generation,  he  banks  on  the  long-distance 
telephone.  Over  this  he  consults  and  is  consulted.  He 
is  decisive  in  his  counsels,  quick  and  certain  in  his 
opinions,  and  wise  in  his  deductions.  And  yet  when 


WILLIAM  ALLEN  WHITE  25 

he  turns  away  from  the  telephone,  you  are  quite  sure 
that  even  in  this  instant  action  and  alertness,  he  has 
been  thinking  of  something  else — and  something  else 
of  greater  moment.  In  another  man,  you  might  say 
that  he  was  one  who  was  keeping  rein  on  his  own 
enthusiasms,  and  guarding  against  self-deception.  But 
White's  detachment  is  not  that.  It  is  something  else — 
as  though  he  were  fitting  passing  detail  into  a  bigger 
future,  which  he  is  painting  for  himself  and  not 
exhibiting. 

"Commercially  White  has  a  good  head.  He  knows 
costs  in  his  own  establishment — a  newspaper  office.  He 
can  talk  depreciation,  overhead,  indirect  labor.  Profit 
and  loss  and  what  can  and  can  not  be  done  with  it, 
as  an  accounting  device,  is  known  to  him  as  to  a  bang- 
up  book-keeper.  Around  his  shop  he  knows  the  news 
print  on  hand,  whether  the  quality  of  ink  is  keeping  up 
and  whether  Grocer  Jones  has  left  his  advertisement 
out  and  why.  He  is  a  busy,  bustling,  belligerent  solic 
itor  for  business  about  town,  an  absolutely  consistent 
assailant  on  bills  payable  and  an  enthusiastic  enemy  of 
overdrafts.  Commercially  he  carries  on  well.  When 
he  is  at  it  you  might  say  that  he  is  a  born  business 
genius — except  that  he  here  again  shows  the  same 
detachment. 

"Is  this  detachment  his  literary  side,  which  is  whir 
ring  away  in  his  mind  when  he  is  busy  in  other  activ 
ities?  Are  the  things  he  sees  at  home,  in  business  and 
politics  grist  to  his  literary  mill  and  therefore  incidental 
to  his  chief  mental  activity — the  writing  of  books?  I 
do  not  think  so.  White  writes  his  books  by  burning 
the  kilowatt  hours.  He  is  infinitely  painstaking.  He 


26    THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

lives  the  men  and  women  he  depicts.  But  in  the  midst 
of  it  he  remains  the  artist.  He  knows  when  the  foot 
lights  are  acting  up  and  the  back-drop  is  askew.  His 
creations  are  characters — but  they  are  creations  and 
so  are  their  environments.  But  when  White  has  been 
face  to  face  with  them  in  all  the  tender  love  that  an 
author  must  have  for  his  own,  he  turns  away  with  the 
old  detachment  intact  and  unbetrayed. 

"There  is  no  particular  psychology  to  be  read  in  all 
this.  It  may  or  it  may  not  yield  anything  to  analysis. 
But  as  I  have  studied  him,  it  is  White." 


THE  WORKS  OF  WILLIAM  ALLEN  WHITE: 

The  Real  Issue  and  Other  Stones  (1896),  The 
Court  of  Boyville  (1899),  Stratagems  and  Spoils 
(1901),  In  Our  Town  (1906),  A  Certain  Rich  Man 
(1909),  The  Old  Order  Changeth  (1910),  God's  Pup 
pets  (1916),  The  Martial  Adventures  of  Henry  and 
Me  (1918),  In  the  Heart  of  a  Fool  (1918). 


CHAPTER  IV 

ERNEST  POOLE 

The  Macmillan  Company  has  issued  a  leaflet  con 
cerning  His  Family,  the  second  of  Mr.  Poole's  novels 
— a  leaflet  recounting  in  detail  the  story  of  Mr.  Poole's 
days.  In  like  manner,  the  John  Lane  Company  once 
issued  a  leaflet  concerning  Mr.  Theodore  Dreiser;  but 
whereas  the  Poole  affair  was  written  in  Macmillan's 
offices  by  Macmillan's  men,  the  Dreiser  pamphlet 
quotes  Mr.  Edgar  Lee  Masters,  Mr.  Arthur  Davison 
Ficke,  Professor  John  Cowper  Powys,  Mr.  Harris 
Merton  Lyon — and  at  great  length,  page  after  page, 
essay  and  verse.  The  Dreiser  pamphlet  is  well  worth 
reading;  I  have  enjoyed  it  immensely;  it  is  most  in 
structive — in  especial  Mr.  Lyon,  quoted  from  Reedy's 
Mirror : — 

"In  many  ways,  my  masters,  the  one  man  writing 
in  this  country  to-day  that  is  worth  the  lot  of  them. 
All  the  good  magazine  fellows — and  they  are  good 
fellows,  the  Tarkingtons,  Beaches,  Londons,  and  the 
rest — may  play  their  little  light-hearted  game  and  fare 
on  into  the  dusk,  pleased  that  they  did  nothing  and 
did  it  well.  They  are  for  the  most  part  dead  before 
they  die,  and  so  no  mystery.  But  here  is  a  fellow  who 
now  shows  as  if  he  may  never  die  at  all — whose  work 
reveals  at  once  that  lucidity  and  that  inscrutability 

27 


28   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

which  we  accord  the  seer.  This  man  is  mysterious;  he 
is  interesting.  .  .  ."  And  so  on,  through  several 
pages,  ending  as  he  began :  'The  one  man,  my  masters, 
worth  the  lot  of  them." 

It  is  well  done,  but  it  is  the  sort  of  thing  that  I  could 
never  do.  Not  that  I  am  so  blamed  honest  I  dare  not 
make  a  sweeping  statement  that,  under  torture,  I  would 
not  vouch  for ;  but  that  I  should  feel  ridiculous,  speak 
ing  out  of  a  limited  knowledge  of  "the  Tarkingtons, 
Beaches,  Londons,  and  the  rest."  For  though  I  am 
writing  a  book  about  them,  my  knowledge  is  lim 
ited.  .  .  . 

So  far  as  I  can  make  out,  Mr.  Ernest  Poole,  though 
more  of  a  novelist  than  most  magazine  fellows,  has 
been  acclaimed  beyond  his  just  deserts :  he  is  not  a 
great  novelist,  in  the  sense  that  Mr.  Wells  is  great, 
that  Mr.  Conrad  is  a  novelist.  He  writes  well  of  cer 
tain  charming  old  men,  twilight  figures,  and  of  a  cer 
tain  restless  and  ambitious  type  of  woman.  He  writes 
beautifully  of  Russia;  in  fact,  I  am  rather  inclined  to 
agree  with  him  that  his  best  writing  is  in  The  Village, 
a  book  of  Russian  Impressions.  He  is  painstaking,  a 
student,  and  ranks  with  the  leaders  in  American  let 
ters — though  not  with  Mr.  Cabell  or  Mr.  Dreiser.  He 
made  his  reputation,  on  the  instant,  with  The  Harbor, 
a  story  of  the  constantly  changing  life  along  the 
wharves  about  New  York  City;  strengthened  it  with 
His  Family,,  memorable  for  the  character  of  Roger 
Gale,  the  father;  established  it  as  of  more  than  fleeting 
concern  to  the  wise  with  His  Second  Wife.  To'write 
and  publish  three  first-class  novels  in  three  years  is  no 
slight  achievement. 


ERNEST  POOLE  29 

Mr.  Poole  was  born  in  Chicago,  January  23,  1880, 
in  an  old-fashioned  red  brick  house  over  on  the  north 
side.  When  about  seven  or  eight  years  of  age,  grow 
ing  adventurous,  he  joined  a  gang  of  boys  and  played 
at  various  wars  among  the  lumber  in  the  yards  down 
near  the  mouth  of  the  river.  Later  he  was  sent  to  a 
private  school  and  took  some  part  in  athletics.  Mean 
while  he  had  taken  up  the  violin  and  had  begun  to 
hope  that  some  day  he  might  become  a  great  musician 
— and  so,  being  prepared  for  college  a  year  ahead  of 
schedule,  he  devoted  that  year  to  the  study  of  music. 
Then  he  went  to  Princeton.  "It  got  a  tremendous  grip 
on  me,"  he  says,  "the  more  so  because  in  my  freshman 
year  I  was  not  only  for  a  time  on  the  Mandolin  Club, 
rehearsing,  making  short  trips,  etc.,  but  because  I  also 
tried  out  for  the  daily  paper,  scouring  the  college  for 
news  of  all  kinds.  I  spent  about  six  hours  a  day  on 
these  two  essential  parts  of  a  college  education — and 
failed  in  both.  I  was  dropped  from  the  Mandolin 
Club  before  the  Xmas  trip  and  was  not  elected  an 
editor  in  the  spring  election.  I  doubt  if  I  shall  ever 
forget  the  night  on  the  campus  when  a  friend  going 
by  on  a  bicycle  told  me  of  that  failure." 

Later,  however,  he  was  busy  in  other  college  doings : 
stood  fairly  well  in  his  studies,  graduating  as  an  honor 
man.  And  he  spent  a  great  deal  of  time  in  reading — 
long  afternoons  in  the  quiet  old  Princeton  library, 
rummaging  through  books  of  all  sorts;  and  some  time 
writing — the  libretto  of  a  light  opera  refused  by  the 
Dramatic  Club,  another  play  that  received  rather  more 
than  passing  attention  from  the  English  professors. 
He  belonged  to  one  of  those  famous  eating-clubs  that 


30   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

so  enraged  Mr.  Wilson,  took  long  tramps  in  the  coun 
try  round  about.  "On  the  whole  I  had  a  wonderful 
time,"  he  says,  "and  should  not  like  to  have  missed 
it — though  I  realize  how  many  other  things  I  might 
have  learned  in  those  four  years." 

In  1902  he  went  to  live  in  the  University  Settlement 
on  New  York's  East  Side — simply  because  he  wanted 
to  write  about  life  in  the  crowded  tenement  sections 
and  wanted  to  see  it  all  first  hand.  He  spent  two 
or  three  years  down  there,  doing  little  or  no  settlement 
work,  giving  his  days  and  nights  to  digging  into  the 
ways  of  existence,  the  terrors,  the  celebrations  of  the 
poor — writing  short  stories  and  news  articles  for  vari 
ous  magazines.  In  this  work  he  was  pushed  more 
and  more  into  the  labor  and  radical  movement  as  a 
way  out  of  the  poverty  everywhere  so  terrible,  calling 
for  some  alleviation.  He  began  to  write  articles  on 
the  labor  unions;  and  as  the  Outlook  correspondent  in 
the  big  stockyard  strike  out  in  Chicago,  he  lived  for 
six  weeks  in  the  stockyards,  becoming  a  sort  of  volun 
teer  press  agent  for  the  union — and  in  that  capacity 
was  allowed  to  sit  in  at  the  meetings  of  the  Strike 
Committee.  A  great  part  of  the  information  thus 
secured  he  used  years  later  in  the  latter  part  of  The 
Harbor. 

Meanwhile  he  had  grown  interested  in  the  radical 
movement  throughout  the  world,  especially  in  Russia ; 
and  during  the  revolutionary  movement  there  in  1905 
he  went  over  for  the  Outlook  and  remained  through 
several  months,  traveling  from  Petrograd  all  the  way 
south  to  the  Caucasus — an  exciting  journey.  He  was 
then  twenty-four  years  old. 


ERNEST  POOLE  31 

Later,  when  he  came  back,  he  went  on  writing  for 
the  magazines,  rather  centering  his  efforts  on  procur 
ing  help  and  sympathy  for  the  Russian  revolution 
aries. 

Shortly  thereafter  he  married,  and  during  the  next 
few  years  he  lived  in  a  small  house  near  Washington 
Square,  giving  his  time  over  to  the  writing  of  plays. 
About  a  dozen  in  all  were  written,  though  but  six 
were  submitted — and  of  those  six,  three  produced,  two 
in  New  York,  one  on  the  road.  From  a  financial  point 
of  view,  they  were  all  failures,  for  the  longest  run 
was  less  than  three  months.  But  they  attracted  some 
notice,  and  more  than  that:  they  helped  him  to  learn 
how  to  write. 

About  five  years  ago  he  turned  to  books — wrote 
The  Harbor  and  then  His  Family.  It  was  His  Family 
which  won  for  Ernest  Poole  the  Pulitzer  prize  of 
$1,000  as  "the  American  novel  published  during  the 
year  which  shall  best  present  the  wholesome  atmos 
phere  of  American  life  and  the  highest  standard  of 
American  manners  and  manhood."  On  each  some 
thing  like  a  year  and  a  half  was  spent,  writing  and 
re-writing — Mr.  Poole  preferred  to  re-write  and  polish 
rather  than  to  struggle  through  the  first  rough  drafts. 
"I  wrote  each  novel  some  eight  or  nine  times/'  he  says. 
Since  then  he  has  published  a  short  novel  called  His 
Second  Wife  and  two  books  on  Russia  which  I,  for 
one,  am  grateful  for:  The  Dark  People  and  The 
Village. 

During  the  war  he  went  to  Germany  as  a  corre 
spondent  and  spent  some  weeks  at  the  Western  Front. 
When  our  country  entered  the  war  he  went  into  the 


32   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

Foreign  Press  Bureau  of  the  Committee  on  Public 
Information — and  shortly  after  left  for  Russia  again 
as  a  correspondent. 

He  is  now,  with  armistice,  the  press  bureau  closed, 
back  at  home  working  on  another  novel. 

THE  WORKS  OF  ERNEST  POOLE  : 

The  Harbor  (1915),  His  Family  (1917),  His  Sec 
ond  Wife  (1918),  The  Dark  People  (1918),  The 
Village,  Russian  Impressions  (1919). 


CHAPTER  V 

JOSEPH    HERGESHEIMER 

In  The  Mentor  for  September,  1918,  having  devoted 
a  page  to  Mr.  Rex  Beach  and  another  to  Mr.  Robert 
W.  Chambers,  Mr.  Arthur  B.  Maurice  allows  a  sen 
tence  to  Mr.  Hergesheimer.  'Tis  gracious  of  him,  for 
(as  he  says)  Mr.  Hergesheimer  "has  won  a  place 
among  writers  by  reason  of  his  picturesque  style  and 
original  invention."  Indeed — and  Mr.  Knopf,  being 
his  publisher,  will  swear  to  it — he  is  by  some  regarded 
as  "our  most  important  novelist,"  though  he  lack  the 
gay  humor  of  Mr.  Tarkington,  the  scholarly  wit  of 
Mr.  Cabell,  the  style  of  Mr.  Howells. 

Mr.  Hergesheimer  is  the  author  of  The  Lay  An 
thony,  as  surprising  a  first  novel  as  any  in  a  decade; 
of  The  Three  Black  Pennys,  which  goes  far  to  fulfill 
that  early  promise;  of  the  exotic  Java  Head;  of 
Mountain  Blood,  a  romantic  melodrama  written  around 
life  in  the  Virginia  mountains;  and  of  various  shorter 
tales  in  the  Saturday  Evening  Post  and  in  that  re 
markable  collection,  Blood  and  Iron. 

The  Lay  Anthony.  Mr.  Hergesheimer  has  con 
fessed  that,  his  being  a  'prentice  hand,  he  was  not 
altogether  successful  in  his  attempt  to  retell,  in  terms 
of  the  modern  young  man,  the  Platonic  romance  of 
Dante  and  Beatrice.  Yet  the  tale  has  much  to  com- 


34  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

mend  it — an  (in  American  letters)  unexampled  use  of 
color,  red  and  purple  and  gold;  the  heady  fragrance 
of  lilacs  blown  by  an  April  whisper  of  wind  across 
shaded  level  lawns  to  one  passing  beyond  the  garden 
wall;  the  sudden  burgeoning  of  a  long  delayed  spring; 
the  echo  of  that  search,  chronicled  in  ancient  legend, 
which  leads,  if  not  to  the  Holy  Grail,  to  a  victory  over 
life  in  death,  the  victory  of  Mr.  Conrad's  Lena.  As 
Sir  Launcelot  worshiped  and  served  the  Queen,  deny 
ing  the  Lily  Maid  of  Astolot,  so  young  Anthony  Ball 
put  aside  Miss  Annot  Hardinge  with  memories  of 
Eliza  Dreen;  as  the  Great  St.  Anthony  was  tempted 
in  the  Egyptian  desert  about  the  year  271,  so  was 
Mr.  Hergesheimer's  Lay  Anthony  tempted  almost  be 
yond  denial  by  the  wantons  of  our  less  spectacular 
day — but  Mr.  Hergesheimer  bequeathes  his  hero  for 
strength  in  resistance  only  a  dream  of  perfect  earthly 
love,  illusion,  of  the  lost,  not  that  divine  fire  which 
burned  to  an  asli,  flared  in  a  last  ascension  of  light  to 
guide  the  faltering  feet  of  Azrael's  dark  angel,  in  the 
hearts  of  such  hermits  as  are  canonized  because  they 
served  God  in  a  world  of  His  own  making,  far  from 
the  comforting  and  vain  makeshifts  of  man's  fool- 
paradise.  Nor  is  Mr.  Hergesheimer's  hero  proud  of 
his  chastity  as  were  those  old  fathers  of  the  church. 
"Secretly,  and  in  an  entirely  natural  and  healthy  man 
ner,  he  was  ashamed  for  his  innocence;  he  carefully 
concealed  it  in  an  elaborate  assumption  of  wide  world 
ly  knowledge  and  experience,  in  an  attitude  of  cynical 
comprehension,  and  indifference  toward  girls."  So, 
that  in  the  end  it  becomes  unhealthy,  an  obsession  with 
him,  converting  him  to  an  exaggerated  belief  in  the 


JOSEPH  HERGESHEIMER  35 

virtue  of  physical  virginity — not,  by  any  manner  of 
means,  for  all  our  puritanic  faiths,  for  all  his  knightly 
continence,  the  most  precious  of  man's  possessions,  for 
virtue  is  of  the  spirit,  not  of  the  flesh;  so  that  he  dies, 
with  his  lady's  name  on  his  lips,  pure — "in  the  exact, 
physical  aspect  of  the  word" — dies  (because  Mr. 
Hergesheimer  is  something  of  an  ironist)  unsoiled 
upon  a  bed  in  a  bawdy  house.  .  .  . 

The  Three  Black  Penny s  (in  which  three  men  and 
three  women  stand  out  from  the  printed  page,  living 
their  passionate  lives  with  unforgetable  earnestness) 
suggests  both  Mr.  Conrad  and  Mr.  Galsworthy  in 
character  and  distinction  of  writing — "a  novel,"  as 
Mr.  Mencken  has  said,  "that  commands  respect."  In 
deed  The  Three  Black  Pennys  goes  far  to  make  of 
Java  Head  an  anti-climax — Java  Head  which  owes 
altogether  too  much  to  a  reading  of  Mr.  Conrad:  no 
stay-at-home  coming  by  inland-waterways  to  a  casual 
acquaintance  with  the  sea,  with  ships  and  those  who 
voyage  far  on  them,  dare  force  a  comparison  with 
the  author  of  Youth  and  Typhoon  .  ,  .  and  Mr. 
Hergesheimer,  setting  his  stage  in  the  Salem  of  Folk's 
administration  (circa  1848),  takes  the  marriage  of 
An  Outcast  of  the  Islands,  elevates  it  to  the  social 
pretensions  of  old  New  England  mariners  and  the 
dignity  of  a  Manchu  lady  of  rank — and  breaks  it 
against  Puritan  prejudice  and  the  opium  dreams  of  a 
shipping-clerk.  A  worthy  book — do  not  misunder 
stand — but  not  the  best  that  Mr.  Hergesheimer  is  ca 
pable  of;  a  charming  book,  subdued  and  deliberately 
patterned  in  a  mosaic  of  silks,  scented  fans,  poppy 
fantasies,  the  quiet  broken  now  and  again  by  the  iras- 


36  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

cible  Captain  Ammidon,  Sr.,  or  the  laughter  of  girls 
on  their  way  to  dance  with  beauxs  of  accepted  propri 
ety,  melancholy  with  the  whine  of  the  Nautilus  tug 
ging  at  her  anchor,  conquering  as  she  put  out  to  sea. 
Mr.  Hergesheimer  is  always  to  be  read.  .  .  . 

"But  personally,"  he  says,  "I  am  without  interest. 
I  live  in  a  very  old  long  low  gray  stone  house  beyond 
a  little  town,  a  pleasant  place  and  a  pleasant  interior 
with  wide  fireplaces  and  walnut  furniture  and  bright 
archaic  rugs.  I  have  been  happily  married  for  eleven 
years  and  have  no  children.  My  pleasures  are  very 
commonplace — rock  bass  fishing,  golf  and  the  repre 
hensible  game  of  poker;  in  these  I  am  successful  (or 
it  may  be  luck)  only  in  the  fishing. 

"The  grandfather  with  whom  I  lived  as  a  child  and 
boy,  my  mother's  father,  was  Thomas  MacKellar,  a 
Scots-American  typefounder  and  hymn-writer.  My 
father's  family  had  lived  for  a  respectable  number  of 
generations  in  Philadelphia.  He  (my  father)  was  an 
officer  in  the  United  States  Coast  and  Geodetic  Sur 
vey;  a  stout  and,  to  me,  largely  strange  individual 
with  bright  blue  eyes  and  temper  and  cheeks  bronzed 
with  exposure.  As  much  as  anything  I  remember  him, 
in  the  rare  hours  when  he  was  home,  playing  fright 
fully  on  the  fiddle — yet  there  is  another  memory,  per 
haps  more  significant  than  the  melancholy  strains  of 
The  Arkansas  Traveler  .  .  .  my  father  bending  over 
a  large  table  on  trestles,  drawing  with  beautiful  pa 
tience  huge  intricate  maps. 

"My  grandfather's  house  was  rather  large  and  of 
stone,  with  a  tower  on  the  fagade  and  supporting 
porches;  it  was  in  a  suburb  of  Philadelphia,  a  place 


JOSEPH  HERGESHEIMER  37 

of  smooth  lawns  and  solid  houses  and  shaded  streets; 
our  grounds  swept  back  and  down  to  the  stables  and 
the  coachman's  house  hung  with  wistaria;  there  were 
a  great  many  fruit  trees  with  their  succession  of 
blossoms  and  a  fountain  with  stone  cupids,  a  basin 
and  gold  fish  in  the  front.  All  the  memories  which 
have  power  to  stir  me  are  of  the  various  aspects  of 
nature  and  places — I  remember  perfectly  the  charac 
ters  of  the  trees  at  Woodnest,  though  I  haven't  seen 
them  for  thirty  years;  I  remember  them  hung  with 
Chinese  lanterns  on  the  Fourth  of  July  and  cased  in 
clear  ice  in  January. 

"The  dwellers  there  were  its  owner,  always  old  with 
a  short  beard  and  steel-bowed  spectacle,  rigorously 
Presbyterian;  two  still  more  ancient  great-aunts,  like 
shrivelled  and  blasted  apples;  another  excessively  gen 
teel,  unnatural  black  hair  and  a  proud  face  with  crisp 
surah  silks  and  black  enamelled  gold  chains ;  my  mother 
and  myself.  It  was  not  a  haunt  of  noise  and  I  was 
sick  more  than  a  little.  At  four  of  summer  after 
noons  we'd  drive  out,  two  sleek  fat  horses  in  a 
barouche — grandfather  in  a  coffee-colored  duster,  Aunt 
Henrietta  erect  and  elegant  with  a  carriage  parasol 
like  a  mauve  carnation,  the  coachman  permeated  with 
an  odor  which  I  have  since  come  to  recognize  as 
whiskey  .  .  .  down  by  the  Park  we  drove,  a  way 
by  a  jade  shadowed  stream  with  perhaps  a  rowboat 
on  it  from  one  of  the  small  landings,  a  way  cool  and 
green — Hooker's  green  number  two,  painters  would 
call  it. 

"The  house  had  long  heavy  window  draperies,  white 
marble  mantels  and  tall  glimmering  mirrors  in  gold 


38   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

frames,  onyx-topped  tables  and  a  formal  parlor  with 
a  lovely  Chinese  cabinet  and  smooth  incurably  domestic 
paintings  of  the  Dutch  school.  I  recall  it  best  late  on 
Sunday  afternoons  filled  with  the  wailing  organ  music 
of  my  grandfather's  playing.  .  .  .  Nothing,  I  am  cer 
tain,  has  since  had  any  such  power  to  impress  itself 
upon  me  as  that  period.  At  perhaps  my  nineteenth 
year  every  one,  it  seemed,  died  at  once. 

"What  remains?  I  have  no  dogmatic  religion;  I 
like  the  music  of  Christopher  Gluck  better  than  any 
other;  I  keep  Airedale  terriers  and  no  cats;  I  think 
James  Branch  Cabell  writes  beautifully.  .  .  .  And  I 
practically  never  went  to  school,  and  when  I  did  it 
was  days  wasted;  I  read  trash,  or  (at  least)  that  is 
what  it  is  everywhere  called,  until  I  was  eighteen;  I 
then  progressed  (or  retrogressed?)  to  Joseph  Conrad, 
from  Conrad  to  Turgenev,  from  Turgenev  to  Jeremy 
Taylor,  from  Taylor  to  George  Moore,  from  Moore 
to  almost  nothing.  .  .  .  Looking  back  over  the  whole 
field  of  my  work  a  very  few  things  are  evident,  and 
principally  that  I  always  write  about  people,  men  usual 
ly  near  forty,  who  are  not  happy.  The  story  at  bottom 
is  nearly  always  the  same — a  struggle  between  what  is 
called  the  spirit  and  what  is  called  the  flesh — the  spirit 
is  victorious — that  is  why  it  seems  to  me  my  books 
are  happy  books.  .  .  .  And  I  am,  of  course,  conceited 
— though  the  cheapest  mind  in  the  world,  the  most 
venal  editor,  by  merely  talking  long  or  loud  enough, 
can  send  me  home  full  of  confusion  and  apologies. 
Part  of  my  conceit  lies  in  the  opinion  that  I  do  women 
extremely  well,  particularly  girls,  the  lovely  girls  Tur 
genev  understood  so  completely.  I'd  like  to  write  a 


JOSEPH  HERGESHEIMER  39 

novel  about  a  girl  of  fourteen,  slender  with  a  black 
bang  and  blue-black  eyes,  in  a  modern  hotel  with  por 
phyry  columns  and  turkey  red  carpet,  against  a  back 
ground  of  cold  gorged  women  in  dinner  gowns;  most 
probably  I  never  shall,  but  I'd  like  to;  the  necessary 
sex,  gossamer-like,  an  affair  of  sprigged  cambric, 
might  seem  indecent  to  the  American  public  gesture — 
yet  anything  that  is  beautiful  will  do;  what  I  mean 
by  beauty  is  the  quality  of  a  courageous  purpose  main 
tained  against  the  hopeless  and  transitory  aspects  of 
life  and  death.  The  transitory  in  especial — everlasting 
flowers  are  the  stupidest  imaginable;  this  is  clear 
enough :  that  things  are  fine  and  pinch  the  heart  only 
if  they  are  addressed  to  fatality.  How  long  would 
you  keep  a  muslin  rose  out  of  the  waste  basket?  It 
is  the  same  with  youth  and  love — love  matched  against 
death  and  the  loser  in  the  degree  of  its  perfection. 
"Yet  this  doesn't  account  for  the  setting  of  most 
of  my  stories  back  in  the  Victorian  period,  nor  for  the 
fact  that  in  Italy  I  paid  no  attention  to  the  heroic 
quattrocento  and  .read  nothing  but  in  the  last  part  of 
the  eighteenth.  I  made  no  effort  toward  1840 — that 
involves  an  enormous,  a  distasteful  amount  of  work 
for  which  I  have  the  worst  preparation  in  the  world, 
except  in  the  way  of  persistence.  I  am  always  being 
urged  to  write  about  to-day,  but  my  imagination  goes 
perpetually  back  to  crinoline  and  ormolu  and  sparkling 
hock.  These  things  have  for  me  the  envelopment 
necessary  to  the  calling  out  of  an  emotional  effect; 
they  are  all  of  a  tone,  wistful  and  gay  and  lost;  and 
the  story,  the  elements  involved,  must  be  as  simple  as 


40  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

possible,  the  qualities  that  have  always  been  potent. 
.  .  .  Yet  nothing  is  asserted  for  the  future. 

"After  fifteen  years  of  labor — that  for  any  result 
might  as  well  have  been  spent  in  invisible  ink — and 
now  a  number  more,  I  write  quite  easily,  about  twenty- 
five  hundred  words  long  hand  a  day;  this  my  secretary 
types;  it  is  then  polished  and  polished  and  typed  again; 
that,  in  the  books,  with  three  or  four  proofs  shifted 
in  a  manner  which  must  make  any  typesetter's  mind 
seethe  with  anger — scarlet  to  crimson,  crimson  to  ver 
milion,  and  back  to  scarlet  .  .  .  no,  geranium.  I  write 
all  the  time;  it  is  a  disease  really,  and  anything  else 
irritates  me  out  of  all  reasonable  proportion.  I'm 
naturally  lazy  and  inaccurate  and  procrastinate  with 
out  end  ...  a  more  unsuitable  person  to  be  the  victim 
of  a  hopeless  and  ideal  pursuit  you  can't  imagine." 

Mr.  Hergesheimer  has  written  the  following  books 
of  fiction : 

The  Lay  Anthony  (1914),  Mountain  Blood  (1915), 
The  Three  Black  Pennys  (1917),  Gold  'omd  Jron 
(1918),  Java  Head  (1919)- 


CHAPTER  VI 

RUPERT    HUGHES 

I  wrote  to  Major  Rupert  Hughes  what  must  have 
been  a  charming  letter,  for  he  answered,  "Your  very 
attractive  letter  received,"  and  promised  to  contribute 
an  autobiography  to  my  Lives  of  the  Novelists.  He 
has  been  as  good  as  his  word.  .  .  . 

AN  AUTOBIOGRAPHY  BY  REQUEST 
Rupert  Hughes 

Henry  Fielding  would  have  sat  up  in  his  grave 
with  a  gasp  if  he  had  been  able  to  see  in  one  of  our 
strictest  weeklies  a  recen-t  article  called  "The  Noblest 
Novelist  of  Them  All,"  reviewing  a  three  volume 
edition  of  a  History  of  Henry  Fielding,  written  by 
a  professor,  and  published  by  the  Yale  University 
Press. 

Fielding  made  no  secret  of  his  distress  when  critics 
called  his  writings  "low."  They  would  have  been 
called  "sensational"  if  the  word  had  been  coined  then. 
He  was  a  tireless  portrayer  of  the  fast  set  in  town 
and  country,  among  the  squalid  and  the  gorgeous,  in 
the  attics,  palaces,  inns  and  highways.  He  filled  his 
books  full  of  scholarship  and  toyed  with  Latin,  but 

41 


42   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

he  terrified  many  of  his  contemporaries  by  his  vulgar 
realisms.  He  was  successful  with  his  novels,  but  he 
wrote  also  farces,  burlesques,  librettos,  essays,  travel- 
stuff — almost  everything. 

He  has  described  his  high  opinion  of  the  novel  as 
a  form  of  social  history,  but  those  who  read  him  in 
his  own  day  took  him  as  a  mere  entertainer. 

And  now  he  is  a  classic!  While  most  of  his  con 
temptuous  critics  are  forgotten.  He  is  called  the 
father  of  the  English  novel. 

Fielding  wrote  of  his  own  time  and  people  almost 
exclusively.  He  took  characters  to  see  the  matinee 
idol,  Mr.  Garrick,  and  the  popular  composer,  Mr.  Han 
del.  He  mentioned  his  contemporaries  by  name.  His 
Joseph  Andrews  was  a  parody  of  a  best  seller  about 
a  virtuous  chambermaid.  He  wrote  a  study  of  a 
favorite  criminal  of  his  day,  and  loved  wild  young 
men  who  got  into  trouble  with  the  police. 

One  of  his  most  startling  pages,  and  to  me  one  of 
the  great  pages  of  literature,  is  his  description  for  the 
sake  of  record  of  exactly  what  two  foul-mouthed, 
typical  young  swells  of  his  day  would  say  going 
through  a  door. 

The  reading  of  Fielding  in  my  postgraduate  days 
had  an  immense  influence  on  my  literary  program. 
I  had  planned  to  be  a  professor  of  English  literature 
and  write  a  bit  of  fiction,  verse  and  drama  on  the  side. 
I  came  gradually  to  desire  to  do  for  New  York  a 
little  of  what  Fielding  did  for  London.  My  first  long 
poem,  however,  was  a  blank  verse  dramatic  monolog 
of  Greek  life  called  Gyges'  Ring.  It  was  published  in 
a  volume  that  had  some  superlative  praise  and  sold  a 


RUPERT  HUGHES  43 

few  hundred  copies.  As  a  counterweight,  I  wrote  a 
long  irregularly  rhymed  and  rhythmed  poem  describ 
ing  the  then  new  diversion,  the  "Serpentine  Dance," 
and  trying  to  catch  some  of  its  color  and  swirl. 

I  left  Yale  without  taking  the  Ph.D.  I  had  planned 
to  earn,  accepted  an  M.A.  and  gave  up  professorial 
ambitions  for  what  I  called  "creative"  work. 

My  first  theatrical  production  was  a  terrific  failure, 
lasting  one  night  in  New  York.  Besides  being  ama 
teurishly  written,  and  outrageously  produced,  it  was 
counted  a  silly  dream  because  it  tried  to  put  con 
temporary  costumes  on  the  stage  in  comic  opera.  I 
was  twenty-two  at  the  time,  and  I  feel  a  million  years 
old  when  I  write  this,  but  it  is  a  fact  that  most  of 
the  managers  refused  to  consider  the  work  on  the 
ground  of  its  modernity  and  Americanism. 

My  next  production,  several  years  later,  was  a  sec 
ond  and  last  try  at  comic  opera,  the  libretto  again  con 
cerning  contemporary  people.  It  also  failed  though 
most  of  the  comic  operas  were  now  in  modern  costume. 
Very  little  of  my  libretto  was  left  by  the  time  the  pro 
ducer  got  through  with  it,  so  I  shall  never  know  just 
how  bad  it  was. 

The  same  year  I  collaborated  on  a  Greek  melo 
drama,  Alexander  the  Great,  which  played  a  season 
on  the  road  but  never  reached  New  York — thank 
heaven !  This  was  my  last  effort  at  ancient  or  foreign 
art. 

After  many  failures,  I  got  success  with  a  play,  The 
Bridge,  which  ran  three  years  as  The  Man  Between, 
a  capital  and  labor  play  with  the  hero  a  bridge-builder 
who  stands  between  the  two  forces,  suffering  from 


44    THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

the  excesses  of  both  in  his  frenzy  to  get  things  built. 
This  was  produced  some  years  before  Mr.  Galsworthy's 
Strife. 

My  farce  Excuse  Me  had  an  immense  success. 
It  was  a  character  study  of  Pullman  car  conditions. 
Other  plays  of  mine  succeeded  or  failed  as  luck  would 
have  it. 

On  leaving  Yale,  I  spent  a  few  months  as  a  reporter 
on  a  New  York  daily  paper  and  learned  a  good  deal 
about  the  city,  became  an  ardent  lover  of  it,  and  a 
defender  of  it  against  the  cheap  slanders  of  those  who 
call  it  Babylon  or  Nineveh,  or  heartless,  vile,  or  any 
thing  else  but  a  very  large  group  of  assorted  people. 

I  have  been  able  to  love  New  York  without  ceasing 
to  love  the  small  town  life  of  my  childhood,  or  the 
London,  Paris  and  other  cities  of  my  later  residence. 
I  love  realism  without  ceasing  to  love  romance,  native 
and  foreign  literature,  science  and  fairy  stories,  clas 
sics  and  newspapers,  history  and  vaudeville.  In  fact 
I  love  everything  and  everybody,  and  my  whole  effort 
at  self -education  has  been  to  avoid  condemnations,  con 
tempts,  snobberies,  and  cheap  scholasticisms  or  mod 
ernisms. 

I  was  born  in  a  Missouri  village,  whence  my  parents 
moved  to  Keokuk,  Iowa,  on  the  Mississippi  river  in 
whose  waters  I  spent  a  large  part  of  my  boyhood. 

My  ancestors  on  both  sides  came  to  America  early 
in  the  Seventeenth  Century,  settling  in  Virginia  and 
North  Carolina.  My  mother's  grandfather  was  a  sol 
dier  in  the  Revolution.  Her  father  kept  slaves.  My 
father's  father  was  a  Kentuckian.  As  a  lieutenant  in 


RUPERT  HUGHES  45 

the  Black  Hawk  War,  he  received  a  grant  of  land  in 
Illinois  where  my  father  was  born. 

My  father  became  a  lawyer,  and  played  a  strenuous 
part  in  railroad  development  in  the  mid  West.  He 
became  later  a  railroad  president.  As  a  lawyer  he  has 
been  concerned  in  many  very  famous  suits;  one  of 
them,  the  Scotland  County  Bond  cases,  began  the 
year  I  was  born,  and  ran  up  and  down  the  supreme, 
district,  state  and  county  courts  till  I  was  26  years 
old,  when  he  finally  won  it.  His  analytical  mind  and 
grasp  of  evidence  had  a  great  influence  in  my  develop 
ment. 

My  mother  is  one  of  the  most  artistic  souls  I  ever 
met,  with  as  great  a  love  for  art  and  romance  as  my 
father  for  law.  I  was  brought  up  on  Greek  sculpture 
and  Italian  art  at  her  knee.  My  sister  and  one  brother 
took  up  music,  and  another  is  an  inventor  of  distinc 
tion. 

My  first  published  works  were  sonnets  and  essays 
and  musical  and  art  criticism.  I  spent  years  in 
offices  as  an  assistant  editor  of  weekly  and  monthly 
magazines  and  of  a  world's  history.  I  have  composed 
a  good  deal  of  music,  edited  a  musical  cyclopedia, 
written  a  pioneer  work  on  American  composers,  a 
musical  novel,  and  a  vast  amount  of  stuff  on  nearly 
every  kind  of  topic. 

The  only  claim  a  good  deal  of  this  has  on  tolerance 
is  its  spontaneous  sympathy,  its  earnest  effort  at  accu 
racy,  and  its  expression  of  my  philosophy  of  art  and 
life. 

My  first  serials  were  the  Lakerim  Athletic  Club 
stories  in  St.  Nicholas,  studies  of  real  boys  in  the  mid- 


46   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

West,  and  these  were  my  first  books.  They  still  sell 
though  published  in  1897.  Otherwise  I  was  rather 
slow  about  getting  started  in  fiction.  I  could  sell 
articles  and  essays  and  books  on  almost  any  subject, 
but  nobody  cared  for  my  stories.  Two  novels,  a 
Civil  War  novel  of  Missouri  life,  The  Whirlwind,  and 
a  novel  of  a  pianist's  career,  Zal,  received  very  cordial 
book  reviews,  but  very  poor  sales. 

Gradually  my  short  stories  began  to  be  accepted  and 
to  win  increasing  favor.  Then  The  Red  Book  took  me 
up  on  a  venture  as  a  serial  writer  with  What  Will 
People  Say?  and  my  subsequent  success,  such  as  it  is, 
has  been  a  constant  astonishment  to  me. 

This  story  was  a  thorough  revision  of  a  novelette 
I  had  made  of  an  ambitious  play  that  failed  dismally. 
The  novelette  had  not  found  a  publisher.  I  decided 
to  bring  it  down  to  date  and  to  attach  it  to  the  astound 
ing  dance  mania  that  swept  the  world.  The  title  ex 
pressed  the  moral  code  of  the  heroine.  I  treated  the 
dance-craze  as  an  amazing  social  phenomenon  worthy 
of  careful  presentation. 

The  next  novel,  Empty  Pockets,  was  an  experiment 
in  the  mystery  story,  using  a  structural  device  said  to 
be  new.  I  began  with  the  usual  dead  body  and  then 
instead  of  working  backward  to  the  solution  of  the 
mystery,  I  turned  time  back  a  whole  year,  and  started 
with  the  dead  man  alive  drifting  toward  his  doom 
among  the  various  characters,  so  that,  while  I  did  not 
cheat  or  lie,  the  readers'  suspicion  kept  swinging  from 
one  woman  to  another. 

I  make  no  apologies  for  the  mystery  element  for  I 
have  a  profound  respect  for  the  arts  of  entertainment, 


RUPERT  HUGHES  47 

even  of  clowning.  I  was  proud  when  readers  went 
almost  frantic  about  placing  the  guilt  in  this  story,  and 
the  most  expert  went  wrong.  The  serious  side  of  the 
book  was  the  effort  to  portray  the  very  rich  and  the 
very  poor  and  the  gangster  and  charity  elements  as 
they  mingle  in  New  York.  I  also  studied  human- 
motive,  showing  what  evil  results  proceed  from  the 
best  motives,  and  vice  versa.  I  ended  the  story  by 
sending  the  heroine  to  Europe  as  a  nurse,  since  the  war 
broke  out  just  as  I  was  struggling  for  a  conclusion. 

She  was,  I  think,  the  first  of  the  million  or  more 
recent  heroines  to  go  forth  as  a  war-nurse. 

I  now  decided  to  use  as  an  atmosphere  the  American 
reaction  to  the  world-war.  In  The  Thirteenth  Com 
mandment,  I  tried  to  portray  the  intricate  intertangling 
of  love  and  money  as  they  influence  human  life,  the 
financial  convulsions  of  the  war-period  furnishing  part 
of  the  drama.  This  book  was  also  a  plea  for  the 
teaching  of  a  trade  to  every  girl  for  her  independence* 
sake. 

We  Can't  Have  Everything  was  a  study  of  mar 
riages  as  they  really  are,  and  a  plea  for  cheap  and  easy 
divorces.  Incidentally  it  was  a  study  in  human  dis 
content  and  a  picture  of  the  amazing  possibilities  the 
moving-picture  world  has  opened  for  the  quick  ascent 
of  unimportant  women  to  wealth  and  world-wide 
fame.  The  hero  went  to  the  Mexican  Border  with 
his  regiment,  and  the  novel  ended  with  the  entrance 
of  this  country  into  the  European  War. 

In  the  meanwhile,  I  had  written  a  novel,  Clipped 
Wings,  aiming  to  be  a  faithful  presentation  of  the  life 
and  motives  of  actors  and  actresses,  not  cheap  and 


48   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

tawdry  mummers,  not  the  usual  silly  caricatures  of 
the  stage,  but  a  just  picture  of  the  real  status  of  the 
better  theatres.  As  musicians  told  me  that  Zal  was 
the  only  true  picture  of  a  musician's  soul,  so  actors 
told  me  that  this  book  was  the  only  fair  portrait  of 
the  stage  of  our  time.  It  was  incidentally  an  enthu 
siastic  brief  for  a  woman's  right  to  a  career  apart  from 
family  ties. 

My  novel,  The  Unpardonable  Sin,  was  a  study  of 
Americans  in  Belgium  under  the  German  invasion.  It 
was  documented  to  the  last  degree  and  written  with 
an  earnest  desire  to  keep  its  passionate  emotional  pro 
cedure  true  to  life  and  history.  It  was  the  last  book, 
I  think,  that  Theodore  Roosevelt  publicly  praised. 

My  latest  novel,  The  Cup  of  Fury,  is  a  study  of 
Washington  during  the  war  and  of  ship-building  as 
a  part  of  the  conflict. 

An  impairment  of  hearing  condemned  me  to  stay  at 
home  when  my  beloved  6Qth  Regiment  went  to  France, 
and  I  was  a  part  of  the  swivel-chair  army  for  over  a 
year.  I  thus  learned  to  know  Washington  all  too  well. 

The  novel  I  am  now  at  work  on  begins  on  the  day 
of  the  false  announcement  of  peace  and  is  a  try  at  a 
portrayal  of  the  chaos  that  has  followed  the  war. 

These  novels,  therefore,  form  a  kind  of  cycle  of 
American  emotions  and  manners  during  the  war. 

In  a  general  way,  my  novels  have  concerned  city 
life  and  its  more  exciting  phases;  though  I  keep  em 
phasizing  the  human,  the  village  side  of  the  metropo 
lis.  Some  critics  praise  them  as  veracious,  some  assail 
them  as  sensational.  But  I  write  them  with  all  the 
earnestness  and  fidelity  of  the  historian. 


RUPERT  HUGHES  49 

My  short  stories  have  generally  concerned  the  small 
towns  or  the  poorer  people  of  the  cities.  The  Mouth 
of  the  Gift  Horse  was  a  picture  of  village  ingratitude 
to  a  would-be  benefactor;  Immortal  Youth  placed  a 
scrub-woman  in  an  art  gallery;  The  Man  that  Might 
Have  Been  had  a  shoe-clerk  for  a  hero;  Canavan  had 
a  street-cleaner:  Baby  Talk,  a  Greek  professor  who 
comes  out  of  the  classics  into  a  belated  love  affair; 
The  Old  Nest,  an  old  mother  who  sits  at  home  waiting 
for  her  children  to  come  back  to  see  her;  Don't  You 
Care,  a  small-town  bookkeeper  and  his  dubby  wife; 
The  Last  Rose  of  Summer,  a  village  old  maid  who 
blooms  as  the  other  roses  droop;  The  Lady  Who 
Smoked  Cigars,  a  prospector's  illiterate  wife  who 
learned  to  smoke  to  keep  her  lonely  husband  company ; 
Pop,  a  small-town  merchant  whose  children  look  down 
on  him ;  another  had  a  livery  stable  keeper  for  a  hero ; 
another  a  butcher,  and  so  on. 

A  series  of  stories  of  middle-class  Irish-Americans, 
published  in  book  form  as  Long  Ever  Ago,  has  had 
extraordinary  praise  as  the  truest  pictures  of  these 
people  in  fiction.  I  learned  to  know  the  New  York 
Irish  through  my  activity  as  an  officer  in  the  6gth 
Regiment  for  twelve  years. 

Accuracy  of  dialogue  is  a  mania  with  me.  I  believe 
that  everybody  has  a  personal  dialect. 

I  was  assistant  to  George  W.  Cable  when  he  edited 
Current  Literature  and  he  was  delighted  when  I  told 
him  that  Theocritus  wrote  his  Idylls,  now  in  farmer 
dialect,  now  in  smart  city  gossip,  and  now  in  classic 
Greek. 

Realistic  dialogue  is  a  matter  of  intense  scientific 


50   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

research  and  nothing  pains  me  more  in  many  novelists 
of  eminence  than  the  absolutely  impossible  bookish  talk 
they  put  in  the  mouths  of  their  characters. 

What  the  people  I  know  actually  say  and  do  and 
wear  and  spend — all  these  details  of  our  immediate 
American  life  are  matters  that  I  approach  with  the 
reverence  of  a  witness  of  sacred  gospel. 

I  had  a  dazing  compliment  for  a  certain  story,  Miss 
318,  a  picture  of  Christmas  from  the  shop-girl's  point 
of  view.  It  was  an  attack  on  the  annual  shopping  orgy 
because  of  its  cruel  follies,  I  asked  the  Consumers 
League  for  details  as  to  hours,  wages,  and  the  facts. 
A  shop-girl  told  a  customer  that  she  wished  she  could 
put  a  copy  of  it  in  every  parcel.  It  was  played  as  a 
vaudeville  act  for  years  and  it  was  given  as  a  Christmas 
play  with  a  hundred  performers  in  a  Western  city. 

A  certain  book  reviewer  told  me  recently  that  years 
ago  he  had  planned  a  story-writing  career.  Looking 
about  for  a  field  that  had  not  been  worked  to  death, 
he  decided  on  the  department  store  and  took  a  position 
in  one  to  learn  the  life.  At  nights  he  studied  story- 
construction.  At  this  time  Miss  318  was  published. 
He  said  that  it  told  the  story  of  department  store  life 
so  exhaustively  that  he  threw  up  his  job;  and  it  was 
such  a  master-piece  of  story-construction  that  he  gave 
up  his  ambition  altogether. 

I  am  not  insane  enough  to  take  this  extravagant 
tribute  seriously,  but  it  was  a  pleasant  recognition  of 
the  two  poles  of  my  ambition;  accuracy  and  artistry. 

Many  writers  construct  with  exquisite  sense  of  form ; 
many  compile  formless  documents  of  great  accuracy; 


RUPERT  HUGHES  51 

not  many  seem  even  to  make  the  effort  first  to  select 
true  human  clay  and  then  to  shape  it  with  tireless  effort 
at  grace  of  design. 

While  I  strive  to  despise  nothing  human,  I  come 
nearest  to  hating  the  sneerers  at  our  own  time,  the 
sophomoric  satirists  of  the  American  present  and  the 
pretty  misrepresenters  of  ancient  or  medieval  realities. 
Five  years'  work  as  assistant  editor  of  a  history  of 
the  world  taught  me  the  essential  unity  of  human 
nature  from  prehistoric  days  to  this  evening's  paper. 
Incessant  and  affectionate  study  of  the  classics  keeps 
me  warm  in  the  belief  that  true  classicism  is  shown  in 
an  intense  interest  and  pride  in  one's  own  town  and 
country  and  generation.  I  consider  scorn  to  be  a  proof 
of  ignorance,  and  I  pity  the  poor  critics  who  pity 
American  art. 

What  posterity  will  say  of  my  work,  if  anything, 
I  can't  imagine.  I  am  not  writing  for  posterity.  I 
can  only  say  that  I  am  doing  my  utmost  to  make  stories 
that  are  true  in  all  their  essential  elements  to  the  spirit 
and  the  manner,  the  speech,  the  costume,  the  whims, 
emotions,  moods,  and  social  revolutions  of  as  many 
of  my  own  people  as  possible.  It  is  impossible  that 
everybody  should  approve  of  any  one's  work.  But 
the  larger  my  audience  grows,  the  more  solemn  I. 

I  strive  to  keep  in  touch  with  the  great  spiritual 
storms,  the  scientific  and  political  progress,  the  big 
news,  the  little  gossip,  the  heroisms  of  the  petty,  the 
pettiness  of  the  heroes,  the  tears,  the  slang,  the  flip 
pancy,  the  tragedy,  the  glitter,  the  piti fulness  of  as 
much  of  my  day  as  my  eager  little  brain  and  heart  can 
manage. 


52   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

I  hate  to  go  to  sleep  because  I  miss  some  of  my  brief 
voyage.  I  wish  I  could  live  a  hundred  lives  and  write 
a  hundred  times  as  many  novels,  stories,  poems,  essays 
and  articles,  though  I  write  much  too  much  as  it  is. 
Being  so  charitably  inclined  to  other  people's  faults, 
I  recognize  my  own  countless  failures  and  shortcom 
ings  with  a  tenderly,  forgiving  generosity.  And  so  I 
stumble  on,  having  a  mighty  good  time;  altogether 
glad  to  be  alive  in  this  greatest  period  of  the  world's 
history,  and  proud  to  be  permitted  to  act  as  a  sympa 
thetic  chronicler  of  a  few  phases  of  its  infinite  variety. 

THE  WORKS  OF  MR.  HUGHES  INCLUDE  : 

The  Lakerim  Athletic  Club  ( 1898),  The  Dozen  from 
Lakerim  (1899),  American  Composers  (1900),  The 
Musical  Guide  (1903),  Gyges'  Ring  (verse)  (1901), 
The  Whirlwind  (1902),  Love  Affairs  of  Great  Musi 
cians  (1903),  Songs  by  Thirty  Americans  (1904),  Zal 
(1905),  Colonel  Crockett's  Co-operative  Christmas 
(1906),  The  Lakerim  Cruise  (1910),  The  Gift  Wife 
(1910),  Excuse  Me  (1911),  Miss  318  (1911),  The 
Old  Nest  (1912),  The  Amiable  Crimes  of  Dirk  Mem- 
ling  (1913),  The  Lady  Who  Smoked  Cigars  (1913), 
What  Will  People  Say?  (1914),  Music  Lovers'  Cyclo 
pedia,  a  revised  edition  of  The  Musical  Guide  (1914), 
The  Last  Rose  of  Summer  (1914),  Empty  Pockets 
(1915),  Clipped  Wings  (1916),  The  Thirteenth  Com 
mandment  (1916).  In  a  Little  Town  (1917),  We  Can't 
Have  Everything  (1917),  The  Unpardonable  Sin 
(1918),  Long  Ever  Ago  (1918),  The  Cup  of  Fury 
(1919), 


CHAPTER  VII 

WINSTON   CHURCHILL 

"In  regard  to  my  people/'  wrote  Mr.  Churchill, 
replying  to  certain  queries  of  mine,  "I  am  chiefly 
English,  with  a  strain  of  Scotch-Irish,  and  a  Dutch 
strain  quite  far  back,  the  De Witts  and  Van  Horns  of 
New  York.  One  of  my  ancestors  was  Jonathan 
Edwards.  Another  was  Margaret  Van  Horn  Dwight, 
his  granddaughter,  who  wrote  the  account  of  a  journey 
across  Pennsylvania  recently  published  by  the  Yale 
University  Press,  its  date  being  about  1803.  Through 
her  I  descended  from  the  Dwights,  presidents  of  Yale. 
My  Churchill  ancestor,  John,  landed  in  Plymouth, 
Massachusetts,  in  1643.  On  that  side  I  am  descended 
from  the  Creightons  and  Osbornes  who  settled  in 
Portsmouth.  The  Churchills,  my  immediate  forbears, 
lived  in  Portland,  Maine,  where  my  great-grandfather, 
James  Creighton  Churchill,  and  his  sons  were  mer 
chants  in  the  West  Indies  trade,  with  their  own  ships 
and  plantations.  I  was  brought  up  in  St.  Louis  by  my 
mother's  sister,  where  her  father's  family  was  estab 
lished,  and  educated  at  private  schools  and  afterwards 
went  to  Annapolis,  where  I  graduated  in  1894.  My 
interest  in  literature,  however,  and  especially  in  Amer 
ican  affairs,  had  grown  by  that  time  to  such  an  extent 
that  I  resigned  from  the  service  at  once  and  almost 

53 


54  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

immediately  began  to  write  Richard  Carvel,  which  has 
to  do  with  Annapolis,  being  my  second  book/' 

Mr.  Churchill  commenced  author  with  what  is  (to 
quote  Mr.  Arthur  B.  Maurice)  "the  somewhat  trivial 
The  Celebrity,  1898,  regarded  when  it  appeared  as  a 
satirical  hit  at  the  personality  of  Richard  Harding 
Davis/ '  A  trivial  book,  perhaps,  when  one  is  serious, 
but  none-the-less  an  amusing  first  novel,  one  that  prom 
ised  well  and  that  still  sells  despite  its  age  and  our 
new  interests.  The  Celebrity — so  we  read  in  the 
closing  sentences — "is  still  writing  books  of  a  high 
moral  tone  and  unapproachable  principle,  and  his  popu 
larity  is  undiminished."  The  Celebrity  may  have  been 
the  late  Mr.  Davis;  he  sounds  prophetically  like  the 
present  Mr.  Churchill.  For  Mr.  Churchill's  moral 
tone  is  something  to  bring  joy  to  the  heart  of  all  those 
who  are  interested  in  uplifting  the  fallen;  and  Mr. 
Churchill's  popularity,  far  from  diminishing,  appears 
to  increase  with  the  passing  of  years.  And  I  think 
this  is  as  it  should  be,  for  personally,  being  of  a 
younger  generation,  I  prefer  Mr.  Churchill's  later 
books  and  especially  Coniston  with  its  study  of  Jethro 
Bass,  to  his  earlier  books. 

Mr.  Churchill  is,  as  he  himself  says,  deeply  inter 
ested  in  and  concerned  with  American  character  and 
experience.  With  Richard  Carvel,  which  was  at  one 
time  the  most  popular  novel  in  these  United  States, 
he  opened  a  series  dramatizing  our  history ;  continued 
in  The  Crossing,  which  tells  of  the  first  great  west 
ward  emigration  through  the  passes  of  the  Alle- 
ghenies;  concluded  in  The  Crisis,  a  picture  of  the 
struggles  between  the  old  North  and  the  old  South, 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  55 

1861-5,  localized  in  St.  Louis.  Then  with  Coniston 
and  Mr.  Crowe's  Career,  which  deal  with  the  Boss 
and  the  Machine  in  politics,  he  turned  his  attention  to 
the  beginnings  of  the  struggle  for  popular  government, 
which  has  since  become  a  national  movement.  And 
he  wrote  out  of  a  personal  knowledge  of  conditions; 
for  he  was  at  one  time  a  member  of  the  New  Hamp 
shire  legislature,  1903-5,  and  at  another,  1912,  Pro 
gressive  candidate  for  governor.  He  has,  so  Mr. 
Percy  Mackaye  tells  me,  done  more  for  the  free  peo 
ple  of  New  Hampshire  than  any  other  resident  of  that 
state,  fighting  valiantly  against  graft  and  intrigue, 
giving  of  his  time  and  money. 

"Mr.  Churchill,"  according  to  the  late  Hamilton 
Wright  Mabie,  "draws  with  a  free  hand  on  a  large 
canvas,  and  his  works  have  epic  qualities,  emphasizing 
large  and  significant  movements  and  defining  the  place 
of  individuals  in  them,  rather  than  presenting  deli 
cately  sketched  portraits  of  men  and  women  in  the 
narrower  range  of  personal  experience."  He  "owes 
the  high  position  among  American  contemporary  writ 
ers  of  fiction  that  he  holds  and  has  held  for  nearly 
two  decades/'  so  Mr.  Maurice  thinks,  "to  a  splendid 
persistence,  an  inexhaustible  patience,  a  rigid  adher 
ence  to  his  own  ideals  both  in  style  and  substance." 

Mr.  Churchill  was  born  in  St.  Louis,  Missouri, 
November  10,  1871,  and  spent  the  first  sixteen  years 
of  his  life  there.  At  Annapolis  he  stood  among  the 
first  five  or  six  in  his  class.  He  helped  reorganize  the 
crew,  and  was  for  a  year  crew-captain.  He  played  a 
good  game  of  football — though  his  chief  outdoor 
sports  have  always  been  fencing,  tennis  and  horseback 


56   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

riding.  For  a  while  after  graduation  he  worked  on 
the  Army  and  Navy  Journal,  and  then  joined  the  staff 
of  the  Cosmopolitan  Magazine.  In  1895  ne  rnarried, 
moving  not  long  after  to  Cornish,  New  Hampshire, 
where  he  still  has  his  home. 

If  genius  be,  as  the  painstaking  insist,  an  "infinite 
capacity  for  taking  pains,"  then,  so  I  am  informed, 
Mr.  Churchill  "surely  illustrates  the  adage."  For  in 
stance,  he  rewrote  Richard  Carvel  at  least  five  times. 
He  worked  from  breakfast  until  one  o'clock,  after 
lunch  for  two  hours  or  more,  and  after  dinner  often 
far  into  the  night.  He  was,  it  seems,  ambitious  to 
write  the  very  best  that  he  knew  how.  Writing  be 
came  a  business,  and  was  treated  as  such.  He  joined 
that  strange  and  humor-lacking  tribe  that  rent  offices 
in  some  bank  building — Mrs.  Rinehart  and  Meredith 
Nicholson — and  go  down  to  them  in  the  morning  to 
await  the  muse  or  wrestle  with  the  wrong  word.  No 
more  the  poet  in  his  tavern  scrawling  immortal  testi 
monies  upon  a  beer  check,  or  the  tale-teller  with  the 
wind  in  his  face  striding  the  sprfte-infested  heath. 
'Twas  in  St.  Louis — "I  have  not,  however,  heard  that 
he  (the  Celebrity)  has  given  way  to  any  more  whims." 

Approximately  two  years  intervene  between  one  of 
Mr.  Churchill's  books  and  the  next.  In  1910  he  pub 
lished  A  Modern  Chronicle,  frankly  a  modern  love 
story,  a  study  of  woman — Honora  Leffingwell  dom 
inates  the  story.  This  was  followed  by  The  Inside  of 
the  Cup,  1913,  discussing  the  religious  confusion,  the 
religious  needs  of  to-day,  and  centering  about  the 
Reverend  John  Hodder,  rector  of  St.  John's,  and 
Eldon  Parr,  financier,  one  of  the  bravest  and  most 


WINSTON  CHURCHILL  57 

significant  of  Mr.  Churchiirs  characterizations.  Fol 
lowed  in  1915  A  Far  Country,  and  in  1917  The  Dwell 
ing  Place  of  Light,  both  fierce  and  impassioned  ar 
raignments  of  certain  materialistic  tendencies  in 
present-day  American  life. 

THE  WORKS  OF  WINSTON  CHURCHILL: 

The  Celebrity  (1898),  Richard  Carvel  (1899),  The 
Crisis  (1901),  The  Crossing  (1904),  Coniston 
(1906),  Mr.  Cr ewe's  Career  (1908),  A  Modern 
Chronicle  (1910),  The  Inside  of  the  Cup  (1913),  A 
Far  Country  (1915),  The  Dwelling  Place  of  Light 
(1917),  A  Traveler  in  War  Time  (1918). 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THEODORE  DREISER 

There  is  no  mention  of  Theodore  Dreiser  in  Pro 
fessor  Phelps'  latest  guide  to  literature,  The  Advance 
of  the  English  Novel;  no  word  concerning  him  in 
Pancoast's  Introduction  to  American  Literature;  or 
in  Professor  Halleck's  History  of  American  Litera 
ture;  his  work  finds  no  place  in  A  History  of  Ameri 
can  Literature  Since  1870,  written  by  Professor  F.  L. 
Pattee.  However,  the  loss  is  small,  for  there  is  a 
competent  valuation  of  Dreiser  by  the  late  Randolph 
Bourne  in  The  Dial,  June  14,  1917;  a  searching  dis 
cussion  of  his  work  by  Lawrence  Oilman  in  The  North 
American  Review,  February,  1916;  and,  best  of  all, 
Mr.  Mencken's  hilarious  and  sympathetic  preface  of 
94  pages  in  A  Book  of  Prefaces. 

"I  have  just  turned  forty,"  says  Mr.  Dreiser  in  A 
Traveler  at  Forty — he  was  born  at  Terre  Haute,  In 
diana,  on  August  27,  1871.  "I  have  seen  a  little 
something  of  life.  I  have  been  a  newspaper  man/' — 
he  entered  newspaper  work,  on  the  Chicago  Daily 
Globe,  June  15,  1892 — "editor," — he  was  editor  of 
Every  Month,  a  literary  and  musical  magazine,  from 
1895-8;  of  Smith's  Magazine,  1905-6;  managing  edi 
tor  of  Broadway  Magazine,  1906-7;  and  editor-in- 
chief  of  the  Butterick  publications,  Delineator,  De- 

58 


THEODORE  DREISER  59 

signer,  New  Idea,  English  Delineator,  1907-10,  about 
the  time  Arnold  Bennett,  in  London,  was  editor  of 
Woman — "magazine  contributor,  author,  and,  before 
these  things,  several  kinds  of  clerk  before  I  found  out 
what  I  could  do. 

"Eleven  years  ago  I  wrote  my  first  novel,  which 
was  issued  by  a  New  York  publisher  and  suppressed 
by  him,  Heaven  knows  why.  For  the  same  year  they 
suppressed  my  book  because  of  its  alleged  immoral 
tendencies,  they  published  Zola's  Fecundity  and  An 
Englishwoman's  Love  Letters.  I  fancy  now,  after 
eleven  years  of  wonder,  that  it  was  not  so  much  the 
supposed  immorality,  as  the  book's  straightforward, 
plain-spoken  discussion  of  American  life  in  general. 
We  were  not  used  then  in  America  to  calling  a  spade 
a  spade,  especially  in  books.  We  had  great  admiration 
for  Tolstoi  and  Flaubert  and  Balzac  and  de  Mau 
passant  at  a  distance — some  of  us — and  it  was  quite 
an  honor  to  have  handsome  sets  of  these  men  on  our 
shelves,  but  mostly  we  had  been  schooled  in  the  litera 
ture  of  Dickens,  Thackeray,  George  Eliot,  Charles 
Lamb  and  that  refined  company  of  English  sentimental 
realists  who  told  us  something  about  life  but  not  every 
thing.  No  doubt  all  these  great  men  knew  how  shabby 
a  thing  this  world  is — how  full  of  lies,  make-believe, 
seeming  and  false  pretences  it  all  is,  but  they  had 
agreed  among  themselves,  or  with  the  public,  or  with 
sentiment  generally,  not  to  talk  about  that  too  much. 
Books  were  always  built  out  of  facts  concerning  'our 
better  natures/  We  were  always  to  be  seen  as  we 
wish  to  be  seen.  There  were  villains  to  be  sure — • 
liars,  dogs,  thieves,  scoundrels — but  they  were  strange 


60   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

creatures,  hiding  away  in  dark,  unconventional  places 
and  scarcely  seen  save  at  night  and  peradventure ; 
whereas  we,  all  clean,  bright,  honest,  well-meaning 
people,  were  living  in  nice  homes,  going  our  way  hon 
estly  and  truthfully,  going  to  church,  raising  our  chil 
dren,  believing  in  a  Father,  a  Son  and  a  Holy  Ghost, 
and  never  doing  anything  wrong  at  any  time  save  as 
these  miserable  liars,  dogs,  thieves,  et  cetera,  might 
suddenly  appear  and  make  us.  Our  books  largely 
showed  us  as  heroes.  If  anything  happened  to  our 
daughters  it  was  not  their  fault  but  the  fault  of  these 
miserable  villains.  Most  of  us  were  without  original 
sin.  The  business  of  our  books,  our  church,  our  laws, 
our  jails,  was  .to  keep  us  so. 

"I  am  quite  sure  that  it  never  occurred  to  many  of 
us  that  there  was  something  really  improving  in  a 
plain,  straightforward  understanding  of  life.  For  my 
self  I  accept  now  no  creeds.  I  do  not  know  what 
truth  is,  what  beauty  is,  what  love  is,  what  hope  is. 
I  do  not  believe  any  one  absolutely  and  I  do  not  doubt 
any  one  absolutely.  I  think  people  are  both  evil  and 
well-intentioned." 

Ignoring  Fielding — whose  realism  is  as  honest  as  his 
own,  whose  "immorality"  has  been  as  often  denounced 
— Mr.  Dreiser  is  here  echoing  Fielding's  mature  con 
victions  concerning  life,  lending  point  to  Fielding's 
practice  in  art.  Mr.  Dreiser  descends  directly  through 
Fielding  from  the  Shakespeare  of  King  Henry  the 
Fourth. 

And  it  is  this  attitude  of  his,  this  refusal  to  judge, 
to  come  to  any  final  conclusion  concerning  life — he 
seems  to  interpret  life  as  an  "uncanny  blur  of  noth- 


THEODORE  DREISER  61 

ingness,"  in  the  phrase  of  Euripides,  "a  song  sung 
by  an  idiot,  dancing  down  the  wind,"  or,  to  quote 
Macbeth,  "a  poor  player  who  struts  and  frets  his  hour 
upon  the  stage" — because  his  alleged  "naturalistic 
philosophy"  stems,  not  from  Zola — of  whom  he  was 
ignorant  until  long  after  the  publication  of  Sister 
Carrie — Flaubert,  Augier  or  the  younger  Dumas,  but 
from  the  Greeks,  that  he  so  outrages  his  critics,  appears 
a  stranger  among  the  cock-sure  prophets  who  of  late 
have  taken  to  making  our  novels.  I  was  discussing 
him  with  Mr.  T.  Everett  Harre,  one  time  associate 
editor  of  Hampton's  and  author  of  The  Eternal 
Maiden  and  Behold  the  Woman!;  Mr.  Harre  assured 
me  that  all  this  pother  about  Dreiser  was  sound  and 
fury,  that  Mr.  Dreiser  was  easily  explained,  the  author 
of  but  one  intelligible  book — Sister  Carrie,  if  I  re 
member  rightly;  he  seemed  to  think  that  my  interest 
was  the  silly  curiosity  of  unsophisticated  youth;  that 
going  to  Mr.  Dreiser  to  learn  of  life  was  like  going 
to  the  Delphic  Oracle  to  hear  the  riddle  of  to-morrow 
explained  in  riddles  even  more  involved.  And  the 
answer  was  approximately  the  same.no  matter  whom 
I  questioned — and  "What  about  Dreiser?"  was  of  first 
importance  immediately  upon  the  day  when  I  was 
commissioned  to  write  this  book ;  it  was  the  one  ques 
tion  I  invariably  asked — "It  has  puzzled  me  for 
years,"  said  Mr.  Mencken. 

"Novels  are  a  mere  expression  of  temperament 
anyhow,"  Mr.  Dreiser  himself  insists.  And  surely  no 
one  ever  put  more  of  themselves  into  their  books  than 
he  has.  There  are  no  reticences  such  as  the  shame 
faced  practice.  Why  should  he  elude  his  reader?  Per- 


62    THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

haps.  .  .  .  Listen  to  Mr.  Mencken:  "Of  all  the  per 
sonages  in  the  Dreiser  books,  the  Cowperwood  of  The 
Titan  is  perhaps  the  most  radiantly  real;  he  is  ac 
counted  for  in  every  detail,  and  yet,  in  the  end,  he  is 
not  accounted  for  at  all;  there  hangs  about  him,  to 
the  last,  that  baffling  mysteriousness  which  hangs  about 
those  we  know  most  intimately."  The  mystery  of 
being — the  wonder  of  life.  It  envelops  Mr.  Dreiser;  it 
shrouds  the  Twelve  Men — his  brother  Paul,  author  of 
On  the  Banks  of  the  Wabash,  Muldoon  the  trainer, 
the  late  Harris  Merton  Lyon,  and  Mr.  Dreiser's  father- 
in-law — of  whom  he  writes  in  the  latest  and  one  of 
the  best  of  his  books.  It  is  the  smile  of  Mona  Lisa; 
and  if  it  enrages  those  who  must  have  an  answer  to 
every  question,  it  charms  the  more  patient  and  thought 
ful. 

No  such  huge  and  ungainly  figure  as  the  creator  of 
Cowperwood  moves  on  the  literary  horizon;  we  see 
him  whole  against  the  sky,  his  every  gesture  driving 
a  shadow  across  the  world  that  separates  us,  his  words 
echoing  down  the  wind — and  yet,  'tis  but  an  outlined 
figure — the  man  himself  escapes,  lonely  and  alien, 
.  .  .  but  "really  I  am  not  a  princely  soul  looking  for 
obsequious  service,"  he  tells  us.  "I  am,  I  fancy,  a 
very  humble-minded  person,  anxious  to  go  briskly  for 
ward,  not  to  be  disturbed  too  much  and  allowed  to 
live  in  quiet  and  seclusion.  .  .  .  There  is  in  me  the 
spirit  of  a  lonely  child  somewhere  and  it  clings  piti 
fully  to  the  hand  of  its  big  mama,  Life,  and  cries 
when  it  is  frightened;  and  then  there  is  a  coarse, 
vulgar  exterior  which  fronts  the  world  defiantly  and 
bids  all  and  sundry  to  go  to  the  devil.  It  sneers  and 


THEODORE  DREISER  63 

barks  and  jeers  bitterly  at  times,  and  guffaws  and 
cackles  and  has  a  joyous  time  laughing  at  the  follies 
of  others." 

If  all  sounds  very  simple.  "We  make  a  great  fuss 
about  the  past  and  the  future/'  so  he  says,  "but  the 
actual  moment  is  so  often  without  meaning."  We  can 
— some  of  us — tell  you  what  he  was  yesterday,  as 
author  of  Jennie  Gerhardt,  perhaps  the  most  finished 
of  his  books;  we  can  make  wild  guesses  as  to  his  future 
place  in  literature,  but  for  to-day  be  cautioned  by  Mr. 
Mencken :  "Jennie  Gerhardt  is  suave,  persuasive,  well- 
ordered,  solid  in  structure,  instinct  with  life.  The 
Financier,  for  all  its  merits  in  detail,  is  loose,  tedious, 
vapid,  exasperating.  But  had  any  critic,  in  the  autumn 
of  1912,  argued  thereby  that  Dreiser  was  finished, 
that  he  had  shot  his  bolt,  his  discomfiture  would  have 
come  swiftly,  for  The  Titan,  which  followed  in  1914, 
was  almost  as  well  done  as  The  Financier  was  ill  done, 
and  there  are  parts  of  it  which  remain  to  this  day  the 
very  best  writing  that  Dreiser  has  ever  achieved." 

And  the  best  of  Dreiser  is  the  best  of  our  time. 

MR.  DREISER'S  PUBLISHED  WORKS  INCLUDE: 

Sister  Carrie  (1900),  Jennie  Gerhardt  (1911),  The 
Financier  (1912),  A  Traveler  at  Forty  (1913),  The 
Titan  (1914),  The  Genius  (1915),  Plays  of  the  Nat 
ural  and  the  Supernatural  (1916),  A  Ho  osier  Holiday 
(1916),  The  Hand  of  the  Palter  (tragedy,  1917), 
Free  and  Other  Stories  (1918),  Twelve  Men  (1919). 


CHAPTER  IX 

MEREDITH   NICHOLSON 

"When  I  left  school  at  fifteen,  owing  to  my  inability 
to  master  algebra,"  says  Mr.  Nicholson,  "it  was  with 
the  fixed  purpose  of  becoming  a  printer.  There  had 
been  printers  in  my  mother's  family;  my  grandfather 
Meredith  was  a  printer  and  a  pioneer  editor  in  In 
diana.  I  knew  in  my  youth  great  numbers  of  printers, 
including  many  of  the  old  tramp  genus,  and  I  thought 
them  very  fine  fellows.  They  knew  a  lot  and  I  found 
their  cynical  philosophy  delightful.  To  know  as  much 
as  a  print  and  wander  over  the  world,  holding  cases 
in  strange  cities,  struck  me  as  a  noble  thing  .  .  .  but 
the  gods  were  against  me. 

"For  a  time  I  was  employed  in  a  small  job  office 
attached  to  a  news  stand.  There  I  had  full  swing 
at  Bonner's  Ledger  and  the  latest  dime  novels,  but  I 
was  a  clerk,  not  an  apprentice,  and  only  on  rare  occa 
sions  did  I  get  a  chance  to  sort  pi  or  otherwise  toy 
with  the  types.  I  moved  to  another  and  bigger  estab 
lishment,  but  there  again  I  was  thwarted.  I  was 
required  to  push  a  wheelbarrow  through  the  streets 
of  Indianapolis,  piled  high  with  books  and  stationery, 
and  at  seven  every  morning  I  gained  spiritual  strength 
for  this  task  by  sweeping  out  the  counting  room  and 
administering  to  the  cuspidors.  The  performance  of 

64 


MEREDITH  NICHOLSON  65 

these  duties  had  the  effect  of  stimulating  my  ambition. 
I  resolved  to  become  a  stenographer  and  practiced  the 
pothooks  at  night  until  I  found  employment  in  a  law 
office. 

"At  about  seventeen  I  began  to  write  verse ;  I  wrote 
a  great  deal  of  it.  I  had  been  mailing  my  jingles  to 
all  sorts  of  newspapers  and  magazines  when  one  day 
I  was  highly  edified  by  the  receipt  of  a  check  for  three 
dollars  for  a  poem  called  Grape  Bloom  which  I  had 
sent  to  the  New  York  Mercury.  My  recollection  of 
the  Mercury  is  very  indistinct,  but  I  believe  it  printed 
fiction  against  a  background  of  theatrical  and  sporting 
news.  For  about  two  years  I  bought  the  paper  regu 
larly  but  never  saw  my  verses  in  print. 

"At  nineteen  I  was  reading  law  and  I  learned  a  good 
deal  about  courts,  legal  forms  and  procedure.  Born 
far  from  tidewater," — at  Crawfordsville,  Indiana, 
December  9th,  1866 — "I  specialized  in  admiralty  law. 
The  romance  of  the  thing  must  have  caught  me,  for  I 
ran  down  all  the  decisions  available  in  this  branch  of 
legal  science.  With  all  modesty  I  assert,  pretend  and 
declare  that  at  that  period  I  knew  more  of  the  law 
of  the  sea  than  any  other  Hoosier  ever  knew. 

"At  that  time  James  Whitcomb  Riley's  poems  were 
appearing  every  Sunday  in  the  Indianapolis  Journal. 
I  was  a  stenographer  in  the  law  office  of  William  and 
Lew  Wallace,  one  of  many  fledgling  bards  whose 
work  was  tacked  on  to  the  end  of  Riley's  column.  One 
Saturday  Riley,  whom  I  had  been  worshipping  from 
afar  but  had  never  spoken  to,  appeared  suddenly  in 
the  law  offices  carrying  a  copy  of  the  Cincinnati  En- 


66  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

quirer.  He  pointed  to  a  poem  of  his  own  and  one  of 
mine  that  were  reproduced  in  adjoining  columns,  and 
said  a  friendly  word  about  my  work.  His  invaluable 
friendship  to  the  end  of  his  days  may  not  be  described 
here,  but  in  those  years  there  was  a  sweetness  in  his 
characteristically  shy  manifestations  of  good  will  that 
are  indelibly  associated  with  my  memories  of  him. 
The  first  time  I  ever  ate  beef-steak  and  mushrooms  he 
spread  the  banquet  for  me,  the  ostensible  purpose  be 
ing  to  invite  my  criticism  (I  was  nineteen!)  of  a  new 
volume  he  was  preparing  for  the  press. 

"My  rhyming  in  the  law  office  didn't  prevent  a  few 
attempts  at  story-writing.  The  Chicago  Tribune  was 
offering  every  week  a  prize  of  five  dollars  for  a  short 
story  of  about  a  column's  length.  The  first  one  I 
offered,  called  The  Tale  of  a  Postage  Stamp,  earned 
the  five.  I  immediately  wrote  several  others  which 
did  not,  however,  take  the  prize.  The  short  story 
didn't  interest  me  particularly,  and  after  a  second  had 
been  printed  in  the  Chicago  Current,  an  ambitious 
literary  journal  that  was  braving  the  airs  of  Chicago 
just  then,  and  a  third  in  the  McClure  Syndicate,  I 
didn't  write,  or  even  try  writing,  short  stories  until 
about  six  years  ago. 

"Having  mastered  maritime  law,  I  skipped  the  rest 
and  became  a  reporter. 

"This  was  good  fun  and  I  kept  at  newspaper  work 
for  twelve  years.  Then  I  took  a  flyer  in  business  and 
was  for  three  years  auditor  and  treasurer  of  a  coal 
mining  corporation  in  Colorado.  But  all  this  time  I 
had  been  writing  something,  prose  or  verse,  and  in 


MEREDITH  NICHOLSON  67 

Colorado  I  wrote  a  historical  book  which  is  my  longest 
seller.  I  was  so  elated  to  find  that  I  had  indeed  become 
an  author  that  I  chucked  the  coal  business  and  a  very 
good  salary  and  began  to  write  novels,  essays,  and  all 
sorts  of  other  things.  In  my  experiments  with  litera 
ture  I  have  been  both  serious  and  frivolous.  The  only 
way  to  have  a  good  time  as  a  writer  is  to  do  the  thing 
that  interests  you  at  the  moment.  As  I  have  a  journal 
istic  sort  of  mind,  I  have  dropped  fiction  many  times 
to  write  an  essay  on  some  such  subject  as  Should 
Smith  Go  to  Church?  or  The  Second-Rate  Man  in 
Politics." 

And  yet  Mr.  Nicholson  would  have  me  believe  that 
his  career  as  a  writer  has  been  "sadly  lacking  in  the 
element  of  adventure."  We  have  all  of  us  read  The 
House  of  the  Thousand  Candles;  we  have  most  of  us 
read  The  Port  of  Missing  Men,  The  Siege  of  the  Seven 
Suitors,  The  Madness  of  May,  and  Otherwise  Phyllis. 
Not  that  they  are  literature  or  of  abiding  interest,  but 
that  they  are  carefully  told  tales,  easy  to  read,  charm 
ing  an  evening  before  the  fire.  To  have  so  aptly 
touched  the  public  taste  is  no  mean  accomplishment; 
to  have  known  Riley  intimately,  to  have  written  of  his 
life  in  The  Poet  is  in  itself  something  of  an  adventure. 
What  would  Mr.  Nicholson?  The  romantic  existence 
of  Byron?  the  far-traveled  life  of  Kipling?  the  loves 
of  Ovid?  The  making  of  books  is  a  sedentary  pro 
fession — your  truck-driver  as  a  rule  knows  more  of 
life  .  .  .  "but  I  have  tackled  nearly  everything  except 
a  play,"  says  Mr.  Nicholson — what  truck  driver  dare 
make  so  brave  an  assertion  ? 


'68  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

THE  FOLLOWING  ARE  THE  TITLES  OF  MR.  NICHOL 
SON'S  NOVELS: 

Short  Flights  (poems,  1891),  The  Ho  osier  (1900), 
The  Main  Chance  (1903),  Zelda  Darner  on  (1904), 
The  House  of  a  Thousand  Candles  (1905),  Poems 
(1906),  The  Port  of  Missing  Men  (1907),  Rosaline 
of  Red  Gate  (1907),  The  Little  Brown  Tug  at  Kil- 
dane  (1908),  The  Lords  of  High  Decision  (1909), 
The  Siege  of  the  Seven  Suitors  (1910),  A  Hoosier 
Chronicle  (1912),  The  Provincial  American  (essays, 
I9I3)J  Otherwise  Phyllis  (1913),  The  Poet  (1914), 
The  Proof  of  the  Pudding  (1916),  The  Madness  of 
May  (1917),  a  Reversible  Santa  Claus  (1917),  The 
Valley  of  Democracy  (essays,  1918). 


CHAPTER  X 

SAMUEL  HOPKINS  ADAMS 

"Know,  sir,"  says  Samuel  Hopkins  Adams,  "that 
war  a  la  Sherman  has  pitchforked  me  into  the  job  of 
a  farmer's  chore  boy.  The  farmer  for  whom  I  work 
is  also  named  Adams,  and  under  her  stern  governance 
I  have  learned  much,  though  by  no  means  all,  of  the 
art  of  agriculture.  I  can  now  address  a  pig  in  terms 
suitable  to  his  status  and  value  on  the  hoof;  I  can  wait 
on  a  cow  with  tact  and  decorum ;  I  can  persuade  a  re 
luctant  hen  to  practice  antirace  suicide  over  a  china 
door  knob — a  dazzling  life!  Looking  back,  autobi- 
ographically,  upon  more  easeful  days,  I  recall  that  I 
was  born  too  near  1870" — at  Dunkirk,  N.  Y.,  January 
26,  1871 — "to  be  young  any  longer,  and  am  therefore 
well  along  in  what  Mrs.  Gertrude  Atherton  calls  the 
splendid,  idle  Forties.  My  first  literary  effort  was  a 
critique  upon  the  faculty  of  Hamilton  College,  so 
brilliant  in  manner  that  it  got  me  fired.  Since  then  I 
have  published  ten  books,  but  nothing  equal  in  effect 
upon  my  environment  to  that  early  masterpiece.  With 
the  aid  of  Collier's  I  once  haled  Peruna,  Duffy's  Malt, 
Swamp  Root,  and  other  patent  devices  for  interior 
decoration  before  the  bar  of  public  opinion — they  had 
previously  enjoyed  a  conspicuous  and  profitable  posi 
tion  in  other  bars — and  gave  them  what  their  proprie- 

69 


70  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

tors  confidently  asserted  would  be  a  large  amount  of 
effective  and  valuable  free  advertising.  I  understand 
they  still  consider  the  advertising  to  have  been  free 
and  effective,  but  have  revised  their  views  as  to  its 
value." 

He  might  almost  be  called  the  author  of  the  Pure 
Food  Laws;  and  out  of  his  fight  against  patent  medi 
cine  frauds  started  his  greater  campaign  for  honest 
advertising.  He  has  written  on  tuberculosis,  typhoid 
fever,  yellow  fever,  the  "Nostrum  Evil,"  "the  Special 
ist  Humbug,"  "Preying  on  Incurables."  Because  of 
the  theory  of  journalism  which  he  set  forth  in  The 
Clarion,  a  novel  in  which  a  newspaper  is  hero  and 
villain,  the  New  York  Tribune  in  the  fall  of  1914  asked 
him  to  write  a  short  series  of  articles  on  advertising 
conditions  in  the  local  field.  In  his  novel  he  had  espe 
cially  stressed  the  relations  existing  between  a  news 
paper  and  its  advertisers.  It  was  intended  to  explain 
the  reasons  for  the  Tribune's  new  policy  of  guarantee 
ing  its  own  advertising  to  the  reader,  guaranteeing 
satisfaction  to  the  consumer  in  the  purchase  of  any 
article  advertised  in  its  columns.  "The  articles,"  says 
Mr.  Adams,  "stirred  up  much  comment  and  more 
enmity — the  experiment  was  at  the  time  quite  new 
in  the  field  of  daily  journalism  and  has  not  since  been 
followed,  so  far  as  I  am  aware,  by  any  important  daily 
in  this  country.  They  dealt,  with  a  frankness  some 
what  starling  to  the  advertiser  who  had  always  deemed 
himself  immune  from  criticism  on  account  of  his  heavy 
expenditures  in  the  papers,  with  various  phases  of 
paid  exploitation  of  merchandise,  from  the  out-and- 
out  swindles,  medical  and  financial,  to  the  exaggera- 


SAMUEL  HOPKINS  ADAMS  71 

tions  and  misrepresentations  indulged  in  by  some  of 
the  largest  and  most  representative  mercantile  con 
cerns  in  the  city.  Before  the  twelve  original  articles 
were  finished,  we  had  caught  so  many  and  such  large 
bears  by  the  tail,  and  were  trailing  or  being  trailed  by 
so  many  more — including  two  of  New  York's  great 
department  stores,  one  of  the  big  theatrical  syndicates, 
and  several  rival  publishers — that  it  was  impossible  to 
let  go.  The  series  ran  on  into  the  following  Spring, 
when  I  left  for  a  trip  to  South  America  and  the  smaller 
West  Indies.  The  call  of  fiction  was  pulling  at  me 
again,  and  I  dropped  journalistic  polemics  and  wrote 
The  Unspeakable  Perk,  the  scene  of  which  is  laid  in 
one  of  those  quaint  and  colorful  tropical  'republics* 
which  have  strongly  appealed  to  my  imaginative  sense 
since  first  I  became  acquainted  with  that  part  of  the 
world. 

"On  my  return,  some  months  later,  I  found  the 
advertising  fight  which  I  had  started  still  raging — 
and  was  swiftly  drawn  back  into  it.  What  with  new 
issues  cropping  up,  libel  suits  coming  due — the  sum 
total  of  damages  from  suits  aggregating  some  three 
millions  was  a  modest  six  cents,  a  discouraging  result 
to  our  opponents  who  had  held  the  comfortable  theory 
that  advertising,  good  or  bad,  was  nobody's  business 
but  the  advertiser's — and  the  principles  of  sound  ad 
vertising  spreading  in  various  parts  of  the  country,  I 
was  kept  busy  writing,  addressing  advertising  and 
commercial  organizations,  and  generally  doing  propa 
ganda  work  along  these  lines  until  the  war  broke  out. 

"I  had  meantime  cherished  in  my  mind  the  idea  of 
setting  down  in  a  series  of  stories  the  casual  record 


72  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

of  a  quaint  and  lovable  locality  which  I  had  known 
well  on  the  east  side  of  New  York — this  book,  Our 
Square,  was  quite  aside  from  my  main  line  of  interest, 
which  has  always  been  the  American  newspaper  as  an 
institution.  To  that  I  have  come  back  in  my  latest 
novel,  Common  Cause,  which  portrays  the  newspaper 
in  its  struggle  to  maintain  its  independence  against 
forces  which  seek  to  employ  it  as  an  agency  for  alien, 
and  in  this  case  anti-American,  propaganda.  The 
underlying  theme  is  essentially  the  same  as  that  of 
The  Clarion:  that  is,  the  persistent  and  perhaps  in 
evitable  effort  to  use  the  newspaper  press  for  ulterior 
purposes  and  thus  to  divert  it  from  its  one  proper 
function  of  informing  public  opinion.  There  inheres 
in  this  effort  an  intense  and  dramatic  struggle  which 
has  its  effect  upon  practically  every  phase  of  our  na 
tional  life." 

And  of  course,  as  an  artist  (as  Mr.  Montrose  J. 
Moses  has  pointed  out),  Mr.  Adams  has  fallen  into 
the  snare  of  the  over-zealous  sociological  worker; 
there  is  scarce  a  page  in  his  books  that  is  inactive  or 
freed  of  the  necessity  to  drive  home  the  evils  of  some 
thing  or  other;  there  is  not  a  chapter  (save  in  Our 
Square}  which  does  not  offer  some  antidote  to  our 
present  ills;  he  is  everlastingly  instructing  his  reader, 
up-lifting,  bettering  America;  he  is  an  evangelist, 
speaking  in  parables. 

He  lives  and  works  for  the  most  part  in  the  country, 
near  Auburn,  N.  Y.  Immediately  upon  finishing  col 
lege,  1891,  he  joined  the  New  York  Sun,  an  all-round 
reporter,  especially  good  at  humorous  and  descriptive 
stories.  In  1900  he  graduated  from  the  Sun  and  took 


SAMUEL  HOPKINS  ADAMS  73 

post-graduate  courses  with  the  McClure  newspaper 
syndicate  as  manager,  as  advertising  manager  of  Mc 
Clure,  Phillips  &  Co.,  and  later  on  the  staff  of  Mc- 
Clure's  Magazine.  Then  in  1905  he  branched  out  for 
himself  as  an  independent  writer  and  publicist.  He 
has  since  become  one  of  the  Committee  of  One  Hun 
dred  on  National  Health,  a  member  of  the  Executive 
Committee  of  the  National  Consumers'  League,  a 
member  of  the  National  Confederation  of  Charities, 
the  National  Society  for  the  Prevention  of  Tuber 
culosis,  etc. 

"Of  solid  build,"  says  Mr.  Moses,  "a  blond  of 
extremely  clear  skinned  type,  of  medium  height,  and 
with  a  look  that  betokens  alertness  and  aliveness,  Mr. 
Adams  is  a  typical  American" — whatever  that  may  be. 
"He  is  quick  of  speech,  showing  the  rapidity  of  clear 
thinking,  and  the  importance  of  a  subject  is  measured 
by  the  length  of  silence  before  he  answers.  But  when 
he  does  speak  he  loves  plain  talk;  there  are  flashes  in 
his  conversation,  as  there  are  passages  in  The  Clarion 
and  his  other  novels,  that  show  his  kinship  to  the 
sociological  interests  of  Brieux  as  revealed  in  Dam 
aged  Goods,  and  as  exemplified  by  Shaw  in  Widowers' 
Houses.  .  .  .  But  Mr.  Adams  has  neither  the  artistry 
of  the  one  nor  the  volatile  humor  of  the  other."  He 
is  primarily  a  journalist,  an  honorable  prophet,  a  Tol 
stoy  with  a  quaint  conception  of  What  is  Art? 


CHAPTER  XI 

HAMLIN    GARLAND 

"Please,"  said  Mr.  Hamlin  Garland,  when  I  wrote 
for  the  words  of  Sir  James  Barrie  in  praise  of  Rose 
of  Butcher's  Coolly,  a  novel  also  praised  by  the  late 
Mr.  Henry  James,  "please  do  not  think  I  am  under 
any  illusions  as  to  my  own  work.  I  have  had  so  much 
to  contend  with  that  I  have  only  in  one  or  two  books 
had  the  full  leisure  and  freedom  from  care  which  gave 
me  satisfying  results.  One  of  these  is,  of  course,  A 
Son  of  the  Middle  Border — I  took  my  time  to  that." 

A  Son  of  the  Middle  Border  is  (by  many)  con 
sidered  Mr.  Garland's  best  and  most  finished  work. 
Written  after  the  manner  of  Goethe's  Wahrheit  und 
Dichtung,  it  is  fictional  autobiography — "the  memorial 
of  a  generation,"  says  Mr.  Howells;  "as  rich  in  vivid 
pictures,  sounds,  motions,  people,  moods  as  an  idyll 
by  Theocritus,"  says  the  generous  and  whole-hearted 
Major  Hughes;  undoubtedly  a  difficult  task  carried 
to  a  noble  conclusion — one  of  those  rare  volumes 
which  give,  as  does  Boswell's  Johnson,  a  full-length 
portrait  of  the  artist,  a  man  standing  out  whole  among 
his  fellows. 

"His  men  of  the  high  trails,"  says  Mr.  Howells,  re 
viewing  Other  Main  Travelled  Roads,  "his  miners  and 
hunters,  his  scouts  and  rangers,  have  the  reach  and  lift 

74 


HAMLIN  GARLAND  75 

of  the  vast  spaces  and  lofty  summits  where  their  lives 
are  mostly  passed;  but  their  humanness,  not  their 
heroism,  is  offered  as  the  precious  thing.  Their  con 
tact  with  the  civilization  of  the  East  as  it  penetrates 
on  business  or  pleasure  to  their  primitive  Westernness 
forms  one  of  the  author's  opportunities  of  drama 
which  you  can  trust  him  not  to  abuse  to  the  effects  of 
melodrama.  The  loves  of  these  mighty  fellows,  and 
their  gain  or  loss  of  the  daughters  of  wealth  adventur 
ing  in  their  wilderness,  is  poetry  of  a  wonted  strain, 
heard  from  the  beginning  of  romance  in  tales  of 
adventure,  but  the  love-making  which  goes  hand  in 
hand  and  heart  to  heart  with  danger  and  death  inspires 
no  emotion  from  the  reader  unworthy  of  the  happi 
ness  which  sweet  and  pure  love  can  give.  If  this  is 
negative  praise,  it  is  praise  that  can  be  awarded  to 
few  novelists  of  a  day  tending  to  lose  itself  in  a  twi 
light  of  the  decencies.  .  .  .  He  is  always  in  his  more 
exalted  moods,  longing  to  make  you  sensible  of  the 
mighty  spaciousness  of  the  land  whose  immeasurable 
grandeur  submits  itself  to  the  hand  of  the  prospector, 
the  rancher,  the  outlaw,  as  it  had  submitted  itself  to 
the  grasp  of  the  savage  hunter  and  warrior.  Words 
cannot  give  the  sense  of  its  loneliness,  its  mightiness, 
but  these  people  are  somehow  equal  to  the  conditions 
of  thirty  miles  to  a  doctor,  and  as  many  to  a  justice 
of  the  peace.  .  .  .  Mr.  Garland  has  measurably  suc 
ceeded  to  the  place  in  the  sunset  held  by  Bret  Harte 
and  Mark  Twain.  It  is  not  necessary  that  he  should 
have  displaced  the  earlier  sovereigns  of  that  realm; 
but  there  was  room  for  him  near  them.  One  cannot 
claim  for  him  the  invention  of  such  types  as  Harte's 


?6   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

romanticistic  imagination  bodied  forth,  or  the  crea 
tions  of  that  potent  humor  of  Mark  Twain  which  be 
gan  to  people  our  world  fifty  or  sixty  years  ago  with 
the  Vast  forms  that  move  fantastically'  before  the  eyes 
of  alien  observance.  It  is  not  in  the  direct  line  of  those 
potent  humorists  that  Mr.  Garland  is  of  their  succes 
sion.  Fun  does  not  primarily  seek  expression  from 
him ;  it  breaks  from  him  involuntarily,  and  he  does  not 
create,  so  much  as  recognize,  the  grotesque.  He  does 
not  permit  himself  the  license  of  those  humorists  in 
the  life  he  paints.  .  .  ." 

All  this  is  lavish  praise,  earned  (I  presume),  since 
there  is  none  to  dispute  with  him  his  claims  as  third 
of  the  sanest  to  deal  with  the  West;  yet  is  Mr.  Gar 
land  very  far  from  being  either  Bret  Harte  or  Mark 
Twain — though  not  so  far,  surely,  as  most.  In  Main 
Travelled  Roads  he  attains  and  holds  to  a  high  level 
of  excellence,  drawing  his  figures  in  bold,  broad  lines, 
placing  them  well,  translating  their  lives  into  motion 
and  speech — they  are  as  they  might  have  been  seen 
by  invisible  eyes — but  not  "high  fantastical,"  gorgeous 
with  the  genius  of  Twain,  immortal  fools  of  Harte's 
Puck-like  fancy.  In  The  Captain  of  the  Grey  Horse 
Troop,  apart  from  the  story,  dramatic  and  sure,  Mr. 
Garland  gives  a  picture  of  frontier  life  such  as  he 
alone  seems  capable  of  giving,  army  post  life,  life 
on  the  plains — but  there  is  more  to  Huck  Finn  than 
life:  a  distortion  such  as  is  rare  in  literature.  .  .  . 
Yet  is  it  proper  that  Mr.  Garland  be  highly  praised, 
for  in  our  careless  day  his  influence  has  always  been 
for  the  good  of  letters — and  having  lived  the  life,  he 


HAMLIN  GARLAND  77 

is  surely  the  foremost  of  those  now  writing  of  the 
pioneer — and  the  most  honest. 

Mr.  Garland  was  born,  September  16,  1860,  on  a 
farm  near  the  present  site  of  West  Salem,  Wisconsin. 
His  father,  Richard  Garland,  was  a  native  of  Oxford 
County,  Maine;  his  mother,  Isabelle  McClintock,  a 
native  of  Coshocton  County,  Ohio.  In  1868  the  family 
moved  across  the  Mississippi  into  Winneshick  County, 
Iowa ;  and  a  year  later,  they  moved  out  into  the  prairie 
in  Mitchell  County,  Iowa,  the  scene  of  Mr.  Garland's 
Boy  Life  on  the  Prairie  and  of  many  of  the  stories  in 
Main  Travelled  Roads.  When  about  sixteen  years  of 
age  Mr.  Garland  became  a  pupil  at  the  Cedar  Valley 
Seminary  at  Osage,  though  working  (as  usual)  six 
months  of  the  year  on  the  farm.  He  graduated  in 
1 88 1,  and  for  a  year  tramped  through  the  Eastern 
States.  Then,  his  people  having  settled  in  Brown 
County,  Dakota,  he  drifted  back  in  the  spring  of  1883, 
and  took  up  a  claim  in  Macpherson  County,  where  he 
lived  for  a  year,  studying  the  world  about  him;  but 
in  the  fall  of  the  next  year,  he  sold  his  claim  and  came 
East,  to  Boston,  intending  to  further  fit  himself  for 
teaching.  He  made  a  helpful  friend  in  Professor 
Moses  True  Brown,  and  became  a  pupil  (later  an  in 
structor)  in  the  Boston  School  of  Oratory,  where  dur 
ing  the  years  1885-9  he  taught  private  classes  in 
English  and  American  Literature,  lecturing  meanwhile 
in  and  around  the  city  on  Browning,  Shakespeare,  the 
Drama,  etc.  In  1887  he  revisited  his  people  in  Dakota, 
Iowa  and  Wisconsin — a  trip  which  led  him  to  write 
and  in  1890  to  publish  Main  Travelled  Roads.  The 
next  year,  while  again  travelling  in  the  West,  he  wrote 


78  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

his  first  long  novel,  A  Spoil  of  Office.  In  1892  he 
gave  up  his  home  in  Boston  and  went  to  New  York 
City  for  the  winter;  and  in  1893  transferred  his  liter 
ary  headquarters  to  Chicago,  the  same  fall  buying  a 
house  in  his  native  village — where  has  been  the  Gar 
land  homestead  ever  since;  where  he  spends  a  part  of 
each  year  mountain  travelling,  making  studies  for  his 
novels :  The  Eagle's  Heart,  Money  Magic,  Cavanagh, 
Forest  Ranger. 

In  the  spring  of  1894  Mr.  Garland  published  his 
first  (and,  I  believe,  only)  volume  of  essays,  Crumbling 
Idols — the  next  year  completing  Rose  of  Butcher's 
Coolly,  and  launching  upon  a  life  of  General  Grant, 
which  was  to  consume  two  years  of  his  time  and  be 
published  in  1898,  together  with  a  volume  of  short 
stories.  Immediately  thereafter  Mr.  Garland  left  over 
land  for  a  trip  into  the  Yukon  Valley,  resulting  in 
The  Trail  of  the  Gold  Seekers.  In  1899  ne  married 
Zulime  Taft,  daughter  of  Don  Carlos  Taft  and  sister 
to  Lorado  Taft,  the  sculptor.  He  is  a  member  of  the 
American  Academy  of  Arts  and  Letters,  and  was 
founder  and  first  president  of  the  Cliff  Dwellers,  prob 
ably  the  leading  artistic  and  literary  club  of  the  West. 

He  gives  one  the  impression  of  a  man — interested, 
of  course,  in  the  technique  of  art  as  the  groundwork 
on  which  to  build  the  temple  of  one's  faith  in  life — 
primarily  concerned  with  the  reality  of  man's  achieve 
ments.  His  conversation  turns  about  life.  He  will 
talk  through  the  afternoon,  anecdote  and  quoted  ob 
servation,  of  John  Muir,  John  Burroughs,  the  ex 
plorer  Stephanson.  These  are  the  men  he  chooses  for 
his  friends — men  whose  active  adventures,  thought- 


HAMLIN  GARLAND  79 

fully  planned,  end  in  knowledge  to  be  detailed  honestly, 
with  all  the  persuasion  of  art,  for  the  consideration  of 
others.  He  is  himself,  some  five  foot  nine  in  height, 
of  slim  athletic  build,  and,  in  quieter  tones,  lacking  the 
mad  intensity  of  eye  and  nerve,  somewhat  resembles 
the  portraits  of  Nietzsche,  with  thick  graying  hair, 
bushy  brows  and  drooping  mustache.  He  has  too 
that  air  of  the  philosopher  which  comes  of  being  much 
alone  with  books,  whether  in  the  library  or  among  the 
hills. 

HAMLIN  GARLAND'S  WORKS  INCLUDE: 

Main  Travelled  Roads,  Jason  Edwards,  A  Little 
Norsk,  Prairie  Folks,  A  Spoil  of  Office,  A  Member  of 
the  $d  House,  Crumbling  Idols,  Rose  of  Butcher's 
Coolly,  Wayside  Courtships,  Ulysses  Grant,  Prairie 
Songs,  The  Spirit  of  Sweetwater,  The  Eagle's  Heart, 
Her  Mountain  Lover,  The  Captain  of  the  Gray  Horse 
Troop,  Hesper,  Light  of  the  Star,  The  Tyranny  of  the 
Dark,  The  Long  Trail,  Money  Magic,  Boy  Life  on  the 
Prairie,  The  Shadow  World,  Cavanagh  Forest 
Ranger,  Victor  Olnee's  Discipline,  Other  Main  Trav 
elled  Roads,  A  Son  of  the  Middle  Border. 


CHAPTER  XII 

STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE 

I  have  it — on  whose  authority  I  know  not — it  has 
become  almost  an  adage,  dating  (apparently)  from  the 
beginnings  of  our  culture — that,  on  occasion,  Homer 
nodded  above  his  scrawled  chirography  and  half-asleep 
wrote  what  must,  judged  critically,  be  pronounced  non 
sense  such  as  one  (anxious  for  the  perfection  of  art) 
would  prefer  to  think  him  guiltless  of;  I  know  that 
there  are  sentences  in  Shakespeare  which,  without  the 
toning  of  a  thousand  editors,  the  damned  (with  all 
eternity  through  which  to  fret)  might  never  hope  to 
parse — and  I  am  giving  it  as  nothing  but  the  personal 
idiosyncrasy  of  G.  G.  that  he  delights,  and  has  for 
years  delighted,  in  the  books  of  Mr.  Stewart  Edward 
White;  that  he  reads  them  with  an  avidity,  a  hail- 
fellow  feeling,  such  as  the  awesome  classics  seldom 
inspire,  such  as  one  feels  when  tramping  the  woods. 

Nor  is  this  all,  for  while  upon  his  shortcomings,  it 
is  well  to  point  out  that,  though  he  recognizes  in  Major 
Rupert  Hughes  a  critic  who  does  not  always  stop  to 
think — as  in  a  letter  to  me  acknowledging  my  men 
tion  of  Gibber  and  Pope  and  Richardson  as  remem 
bered  detractors  of  the  buoyant  Harry  Fielding, 
Major  Hughes  himself  confesses,  most  disarmingly — 
he  knows  of  but  few  short  stories  as  happy  as  those  in 

80 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE  81 

Long  Ever  Ago,  of  not  many  he  would  trade  for  Miss 
318  .  .  .  unless  they  be  in  Mr.  White's  Arizona 
Nights  or  Simba. 

(And,  since  digressions  are  in  order,  it  is  well  to 
point  out  to  those  who  listen  to  Mr.  George  Moore  as 
I  might  to  the  Abbott  of  Thelema,  that  that  orchid  of 
our  decadence,  quite  often,  perverts  the  truth  as  wil 
fully  as  did  Rabelais;  and  that  when  he  says  that  Mr. 
Henry  James  went  to  Europe  and  read  Turgenev, 
whereas  Mr.  Howells  stayed  home  and  read  Henry 
James,  he  has  said  nothing — not  simply  because  it  is 
not  necessary  to  go  to  Europe  to  read  Turgenev,  nor 
because  Mr.  Howells  spent  a  number  of  years  in  Spain 
and  Italy — but  because  there  should  be  no  comparison 
between  the  two,  no  necessity  for  abasing  one  to  exalt 
the  other,  no  more  in  common  than  there  is  between 
Dickens  and  Thackeray;  they  are  poles  apart  as  the 
great  invariably  are,  for  it  is  test  of  greatness  that 
men  stand  out,  individual,  apart  from  their  fellows.  As 
Mr.  White  stands  apart  among  the  men  who  make  our 
novels,  a  sportsman  whose  diary,  unlike  Turgenev's,  ex 
tends  to  several  volumes,  and  deals  with  mighty  hunt 
ers  after  gold  as  well  as  game,  at  home  and  abroad. ) 

And  so  to  a  consideration  of  The  Silent  Places,  that 
snow-blinded  following  of  an  Indian  cheat  up  into  the 
frozen  night  of  the  Arctic — or  of  The  Blazed  Trail, 
along  which  Harry  Thorpe  travels  out  of  his  forests 
to  the  house  of  his  April  Lady  that  he  may  admit 
himself  wrong;  there  are  greater  things  in  life  than 
the  hardly  won  conquest  of  nature — or  of  The  West 
erners,  of  Jim  Buckley  and  Alfred  and  Billy  Knapp,  of 
the  wagon  train  they  convoy  through  the  Black  Hills, 


82  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

and  of  the  breed  Michael  Lafond,  who  was  revenged 
upon  them  for  his  exclusion  from  the  party — of  The 
Claim  Jumpers  and  The  Riverman,  Bobby  Orde — of 
The  Gray  Dawn  and  Gold,  detailing  with  a  freshness, 
with  incidental  fictions  that  heighten  the  wonder,  the 
beginnings  of  history  in  the  Golden  West — of  The 
Leopard  Woman  and  the  first  fumblings  of  war  among 
the  white  men  and  natives  of  Central  Africa — of 
Simba,  short  stories  that  photograph  and  retouch  the 
mystery,  the  agony,  the  cruelty  and  marvel  of  hunt 
ing  and  camping  along  the  Congo  and  out  upon  the 
plains  west  of  Nairobi — of  such  trifles  as  The  Life  of 
the  Winds  of  Heaven,  that  mocking  idyll  of  the  North 
woods,  of  Billy's  Tenderfoot  and  such  heroic  shooting 
as  must  astound  the  most  hardened  of  cinema-fans,  of 
The  Two  Gun  man  in  Arizona  Nights,  and  Jed  Parker 
and  Buck  Johnson  and  (to  speak  roughly,  as  suits 
the  company)  hundreds  upon  hundreds  of  others; 
punchers  and  rustlers  and  nesters,  the  "girl  in  red"  and 
the  "girl  who  got  rattled,"  prospectors  and  miners  and 
foremen,  Indians,  Africans,  Germans,  and  (best  of 
celestials)  the  philosophical  Chink — cook,  bottle- 
washer,  and  noblest  maker  of  cake — the  Ganymede  of 
the  West; — of  Kingozi,  mightiest  of  Nimrod's  suc 
cessors  ;  of  Winkelman,  the  German  explorer  and  spy ; 
of  Roaring  Dick  Darrell  and  the  sealer  FitzPatrick — 
and  of  women  not  a  few;  portraits  and  sketches  in 
which  the  once-upon-a-time  lives  in  our  policed  and 
polished  unadventurousness. 

Mr.  Stewart  Edward  White  writes  out  of  a  vast  self- 
made  experience,  draws  his  characters  from  a  wide 
acquaintance  with  men,  recalls  situations  and  inci- 


STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE  83 

dents  through  years  of  forest  tramping1,  hunting,  ex 
ploring  in  Africa  and  the  less  visited  places  of  our  con 
tinent,  for  the  differing  occasions  of  his  books.  In 
his  boyhood  he  spent  a  great  part  of  each  year  in  lum 
ber  camps  and  on  the  river.  He  first  found  print  with 
a  series  of  articles  on  birds,  The  Birds  of  Mackinac 
Island  (he  was  born  in  Grand  Rapids,  March  12, 
1873),  brought  out  in  pamphlet  form  by  the  Ornitholo 
gists'  Union  and  since  (perforce)  referred  to  as  his 
"first  book."  In  the  height  of  the  gold  rush  he  set  out 
for  the  Black  Hills,  to  return  East  broke  and  to  write 
The  Claim  Junipers  and  The  Westerners.  He  fol 
lowed  Roosevelt  into  Africa,  The  Land  of  Footprints 
and  of  Simba.  He  has,  more  recently,  seen  service 
in  France  as  a  Major  in  the  U.  S.  Field  Artillery. 
Though  (certainly)  no  Ishmael,  he  has  for  years  been  a 
wanderer  upon  the  face  of  the  earth,  observant  and 
curious  of  the  arresting  and  strange — and  his  novels 
and  short  stories  mark  a  journey  such  as  but  few  have 
gone  upon,  a  trailing  of  rainbows,  a  search  for  gold 
beyond  the  further  hills  and  a  finding  of  those  camp- 
fires  (left  behind  when  Mr.  Kipling's  Explorer 
crossed  the  ranges  beyond  the  edge  of  cultivation) 
round  which  the  resolute  sit  to  swap  lies  while  the  ten 
derfoot  makes  a  fair — and  forced — pretense  at  belief. 
THE  WORKS  OF  STEWART  EDWARD  WHITE  : 

The  Westerners,  The  Claim  Jumpers,  The  Blazed 
Trail,  Conjuror's  House,  The  Forest,  The  Magic 
Forest,  The  Silent  Places,  The  Mountains,  Blazed 
Trail  Stories,  The  Pass,  The  Mystery,  The  Leopard 
Woman,  Simba,  Arizona  Nights,  Camp  and  Trail,  The 


84    THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

Rivernian,  The  Rules  of  the  Game,  The  Cabin,  The 
Adventures  of  Bobby  Orde,  The  Land  of  Footprints, 
African  Camp  Fires,  Gold,  The  Rediscovered  Country, 
The  Gray  Dawn,  The  Forty-Niners. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

SAMUEL  MERWIN 

Under  date  of  Washington's  birthday,  1919,  Mr. 
Henry  Kitchell  Webster,  author  of  The  Thoroughbred 
and  The  Real  Adventure,  wrote  to  me  from  London, 
saying  that  my  letter,  forwarded  from  his  home  in 
Evanston,  had  reached  him  too  late  for  him  to  comply, 
etc.— "Too  bad,"  he  said,  "but  I  shall  have  to  get  on 
as  best  I  can  without  being  made  famous." 

Mr.  Webster  mistakes  my  purpose — I  have  no  facil 
ities  for  carrying  coals  to  Newcastle.  So  I  appealed 
to  Mr.  Merwin,  who  knows  and  understands  Mr. 
Webster. 

"The  Short  Line  War''  he  answered,  "deals  with 
the  lurid  piratical  railway  days  of  Jim  Fiske,  J.  Gould, 
et  al.  Webster  and  I  wrote  it  together  (as  we  also 
wrote  Calumet  "K"  and  Comrade  John),  because  we 
were  both  boyhood  friends  with  literary  aspirations 
in  common.  Perhaps  also  because  we  were  in  our 
very  early  twenties  at  the  time.  Before  that,  we  had 
tried  to  write  (together)  operas,  both  comic  and 
grand,  books  of  foolish  verse,  and  all  sorts  of  youth 
ful  nonsense." 

They  had  both  been  born  in  Evanston :  Mr.  Web 
ster,  September  7,  1875;  and  Mr.  Merwin  on  October 
6  of  the  year  previous  in  a  little  frame  house  on 
Orrington  Avenue, — to  grow  up  in  a  lot  of  other 

85 


86  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

houses,  and  to  attend  Northwestern  University,  and 
(I  trust  I  am  not  too  sanguine)  to  be  made  famous 
by  me  ...  to  the  amazement  of  Mr.  Webster. 

I  had  been  reading  The  Charmed  Life  of  Miss  Aus 
tin — "  'We  can't  leave  the  girl  alone — in  Shanghai/ 
protested  the  thin  woman.  'But  she'll  be  right  here 
in  a  hotel  full  of  white  folks/  insisted  the  stout  man." 
— I  had  been  reading  of  the  Peking  Pug,  of  Charlie 
Snyder  and  Wanda  of  the  Mysteries,  watching  the 
Chinese  storekeeper  counting  out  great  heaps  of  gold 
sovereigns,  hearing  Mr.  Wilbery,  as  he  sat  right  down 
on  the  sharp  side  of  the  steamer-trunk,  sigh  "Thank 
God!" — I  had  been  having  an  interesting  but  rather 
wild  time 

"Yes,"  Mr.  Merwin  said,  "you  are  quite  right.  I 
used  to  think  only  of  the  story,  now  I  think  almost 
entirely  of  character.  I  suppose  that  is  because  I 
was  young  then  and  am  older  now." 

So  I  turned  to  Anthony  the  Absolute,  followed  the 
wretched  Crocker  up  and  down  the  Chinese  Coast,  into 
(as  was  to  be  expected)  forbidden  dens  and  houses 
where  slant-eyed  lassies,  trained  to  allure,  asked  with 
pathetic  smiles,  "You  no  lovee  me  ?" — We  were  search 
ing  for  Crocker's  wife;  that  is,  he  and  Anthony  were; 
I  was  but  a  looker-on — for  the  wife  Heloise  who  had 
run  away.  Anthony  was  presumably,  and  surely,  col 
lecting  folk  songs.  But,  some  time  later,  in  the  room 
next  to  his,  at  the  Hotel  de  Chine,  in  Peking,  he  heard 
a  girl  singing.  .  .  .  And  there,  in  self-defense,  he 
had  to  kill  Crocker.  .  .  .  Mr.  Merwin  spent  several 
months  in  China  and  knows  the  country  at  first  hand. 
He  describes  it  as  an  eye-witiness,  aind  makes  of 


SAMUEL  MERWIN  87 

Crocker  a  proper  jealous  husband  of  the  T.  B.  M. 
type,  the  lobster  of  the  chorus  girl  who,  despite  his 
own  philanderings,  insists  upon  the  strict  chastity  of 
his  own  wife  with  such  a  brutality  of  emphasis  that 
were  she  other  than  she  is,  he  must  surely  drive  her 
into  the  arms  of  another  man  for  comfort. 

"But  any  attempt/'  Mr.  Merwin  said,  "to  formulate 
my  philosophy  of  writing  in  cold  words  will  necessarily 
be  a  failure  from  the  start.  However,  I  will  try  in 
this;  I  have  a  passion  for  people,  for  the  movement 
and  color  and  bewildering,  constantly  changing  con 
trasts  of  life.  I  love  life  and  living,  growing  things. 
I  do  not  care  for  social  or  aristocratic  distinction  in 
life  or  in  letters.  I  am  afraid  I  like  poor  people,  un 
fortunate  people,  who  have  to  struggle  against  the  cur 
rent  of  life  and  who,  perhaps,  sometimes,  here  and 
there,  gain  a  foot  or  two  or  an  inch  or  two  against 
that  current.  .  .  ." 

Then  I  turned  to  The  Honey  Bee.  The  scene  shifts 
to  Paris.  In  a  taxi  I  accompany  Miss  Hilda  Wilson, 
buyer  for  a  large  American  department  store,  to  the 
offices  of  the  American  Express  Company  to  get  her 
mail.  There  we  meet  up  with  a  dancing  girl  from  the 
Ambassadeurs  and  with  Mr.  Blink  Moran,  a  prize 
fighter.  But  the  words  all  have  a  new  meaning. 
There  is  a  frailty  of  autumn  beauty  in  the  sentences, 
a  grace  not  seen  before — feeling  and  reticence  and 
ease.  And  I  leave  Mr.  Moran,  the  most  thoughtful 
of  wanderers,  and  Miss  Wilson  and  the  child  they  have 
adopted,  after  various  adventures,  with  a  ques 
tion.  .  .  . 

"You  ask,"  said  Mr.  Mervin,  "if  words  have  for 


68  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

me  a  charm  of  their  own.  The  answer  is  Yes,  decid 
edly.  I  love  the  little  distinctions  in  the  meanings  and 
in  the  emphasis  of  common  words  and  their  variants. 
But,  as  I  have  confessed  to  that  passion  for  living, 
growing  things,  so  I  love  the  growing  language  in  all 
its  constantly  changing  new  phases  and  freshly  coined 
bits  of  speech.  This  brings  me  down  sometimes  pretty 
close  to  the  slang  of  the  minute.  For  this  reason  none 
of  those  critics  or  followers  of  current  literature,  who 
live  in  the  past  and  cling  with  dignity  and  determina 
tion  to  the  settled,  established,  prosperous  word,  will 
ever  credit  me  with  the  slightest  feeling  for  style. 
Though  I  have  such,  I  think." 

I  think  so,  too — style  is  not  the  mould  of  form, 
cramping  a  man's  thought  to  certain  set  phrases,  old 
saws,  accepted  idioms,  but  the  gesture  of  personality. 

"Viola  Roseboro,"  Mr.  Merwin  continued,  "once 
said  that  the  American  idea  in  literature  is  something 
as  nearly  as  possible  like  something  that  was  once 
done  well.  I  concur  in  this  characterization  of  our 
unconscious  literary  snobs,  and  prefer  to  remain  with 
one  foot  outside  the  pale." 

All  this  adds  immensely  to  my  interest  in  Temperas- 
mental  Henry  and  Henry  is  Twenty;  for  here  he  is 
taking  one  character,  a  possible  character  through  quite 
possible  experiences  with  a  new  power,  a  growing 
power  over  his  speech.  Mr.  Merwin  believes  that  he 
is  now  just  beginning.  While  his  earlier  books,  The 
Citadel  and  the  rest,  are  not  exactly  wild  oats,  they 
were  primarily  pastime  and  (for  him)  a  training  to 
see  and  express.- 

"The  life  I  see  about  me,"  he  said,  "is  bewildering 


SAMUEL  HER  WIN  89 

in  its  contrasts,  its  movements,  its  color.  The  only 
philosophy  of  life — of  personal  life,  that  is — that  I 
have  could  perhaps  be  best  expressed  this  way;  that  I 
hope  to  keep  in  the  rush  along  what  I  always  think  of 
as  a  sense  of  direction.  Nothing  is  fixed  to  me, 
nothing  settled.  In  writing  I  must  confess  to  a  minor 
passion  for  surface  color  and  contrast.  Thus,  in  The 
Charmed  Life  of  Miss  Austin,  which  was  frankly 
light  enough  in  subject  matter,  I  loved  describing 
Shanghai  at  night  and  the  details  of  costume  of  the 
Chinese  girl  'behind  the  screen/  I  liked  the  big,  dig 
nified  Mandarin,  who  had  played  third  base  at  Yale, 
yet  remained  a  Chinaman.  In  these  recent  books  I 
have  been  doing  about  the  boy,  Henry  Calverly,  I  have 
loved  giving,  or  trying  to  give  a  picture  of  the  old 
town  of  the  nineties  back  in  Illinois;  and  I  have  loved 
the  people — all  the  minor  characters  of  those  stories — 
including  the  ones  I  didn't  like.  You  will  understand 
that. 

"I  wish  it  were  possible  to  express  in  a  letter  some 
thing  of  one's  more  serious  philosophy.  But,  of 
course,  it  isn't  possible.  I  will  have  to  hope  that  you 
will  catch  some  bits  of  that  from  my  books.  I  am 
not  a  Victorian,  except  in  spots.  To  me  man  is  not 
a  fallen  angel,  but  a  rising  animal.  And  I  find  it  in 
spiring  to  think  how  high  he  has  already  risen,  and 
how  bright  his  hopes  are  for  further  growth  and  devel 
opment. 

"And  still  one  last  thing.  I  have  said  (I  think  in 
Anthony  the  Absolute),  'Books  are  pale  things/ 
That,  of  course,  is  true.  Our  accepted  fiction — our 
best  fiction — tends  to  the  thin,  squeamish,  upper-class, 


90  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

over-refined.  I  believe  that  there  was  a  profound 
reason  for  the  Jack  London  sort  of  thing.  Perhaps 
the  war  has  taught  a  few  of  us  that  life  is  immensely 
nearer  the  primitive  than  we  had  dared  to  think  these 
past  few  generations.  Life,  as  I  see  it,  is  quite  largely 
what,  in  fiction,  by  parroty  little  critics,  would  be 
classed  as  melodrama.  I  saw  Walter  Hampden  play 
Hamlet  last  week  and  was  struck  again  by  the  fact  that 
Hamlet  is  melodrama  seen  through  a  mind.  Henry 
James  knew  that  life  is  melodrama.  Balzac  knew  it 
and  De  Maupassant,  and  the  exuberant,  but  pretty 
real  Dickens.  .  .  ." 

Yet,  in  person,  Mr.  Merwin  seems  not  the  least  bit 
melodramatic;  short  and  stout  with  wide  eyes  behind 
huge  bone-rimmed  glasses,  he  is  suburban  America — 
the  man  who  (for  exercise)  mows  the  lawn  and  works 
about  the  garden  in  the  cool  of  the  evening,  for  busi 
ness  during  the  day,  in  the  sweat  of  his  brow,  does  his 
darnedest  to  produce  something  that,  besides  being  an 
honest  and  (to  the  best  of  his  ability)  good  piece  of 
work,  shall  please  the  public  to  whom  he  sells.  Mr. 
Merwin  is  not  in  the  least  theatric,  not  at  all  the  wild 
and  unrestrained  "popular  novelist  of  the  stage."  In 
fact,  I  have  a  notion  that  he  is  (with  Mr.  William 
Allen  White)  the  best  neighbour  in  the  world. 

THE  WORKS  OF  HENRY  KITCHELL  WEBSTER  INCLUDE  : 
The  Short  Line  War  (with  Samuel  Merwin),  The 
Banker  and  the  Bear,  The  Story  of  a  Corner  in  Land, 
Calumet  "K"  (with  Samuel  Merwin),  Roger  Drake, 
Captain  of  Industry,  The  Whispering  Man,  A  King  in 
Khaki t  The  Sky  Man,  The  Girl  in  the  Other  Seat,  The 


SAMUEL  MERWIN  91 

Ghost,  Girl,  the  Butterfly,  The  Real  Adventure,  The 
Painted  Scene,  Comrade  John  (with  Samuel  Merwin), 
The  Duke  of  Cameron  Avenue,  Traitor  and  Loyalist, 
The  Thoroughbred. 

THE  WORKS  OF  SAMUEL  MERWIN  INCLUDE: 

The  Short  Line  War  (with  Henry  Kitchell  Web 
ster),  Calumet  "K"  (with  Henry  Kitchell  Webster), 
The  Road  to  Frontenac,  The  Whip  Hand,  His  Little 
World,  The  Merry  Anne,  The  Road  Builders,  Com 
rade  John  (with  Henry  Kitchell  Webster),  Drugging 
a  Nation,  The  Citadel,  The  Charmed  Life  of  Miss 
Austin,  Anthony  the  Absolute,  The  Honey  Bee,  The 
TruMers,  Temperamental  Henry. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

ALLAN   UPDEGRAFF 

In  an  essay  on  Sir  Philip  Sidney,  Francis  Thomp 
son  points  out  that  a  peculiar  interest  (naturally)  at 
taches  to  poets  who  have  written  prose,  "who  can 
both  soar  and  walk";  and  elsewhere,  speaking  of 
Shakespeare,  he  says  that  "it  might  almost  be  erected 
into  a  rule  that  a  great  poet  is,  if  he  please,  also  a 
master  of  prose." 

A  great  poet  perhaps.  The  assurance  of  Wilhelm 
Meister  is  as  compelling  as  the  genius  of  Faust;  the 
speech  of  Falstaff  no  whit  less  arresting  than  the 
dreaming  words  of  Romeo;  the  charm  of  Shelley's 
letters  as  far  removed  from  the  stereotyped  corre 
spondence  of  the  average  as  is  Adonais  from  the 
elegies  of  a  New  England  churchyard;  and  the  tales 
of  Poe  (to  cite  an  American)  are  as  beguiling  as  the 
most  haunting  of  his  verse.  But  minor  poets.  .  .  . 

Mr.  Allan  Updegraff  is  a  poet.  In  early  youth, 
with  the  brave  faith  of  inexperience,  he  lived,  uncer 
tainly,  from  day  to  day,  down  on  Avenue  B,  from  the 
scant  earnings  of  an  occasional  rhyme.  Though  he 
would  have  me  believe  that  he  has  "done  nothing  save 
two  rather  dubious  novels,  neither  of  which  attracted 
much  attention,"  he  is  quoted  at  length  in  Professor 
Phelps'  recent  volume  on  English  poetry — yet  his 
prose,  often  felicitous  and  turning  with  unexpected 

93 


ALLAN  UPDEGRAFF  93 

daring  upon  the  glittering  surface  of  a  phrase,  simple, 
straight-forward  and  to  the  point,  is  (at  times)  as 
uninspired  as  the  gossip  of  a  neighbor.  The  haste 
of  his  writing  is  too  often  apparent.  He  fills  his  para 
graphs  with  easy,  careless  sentences,  flooding  the  page 
with  the  eager  exuberance  of  a  boy  picking  apples  from 
a  convenient  tree;  he  too  seldom  lingers,  an  idler, 
stretched  out  in  the  shade,  munching  the  fruit  of  con 
templation.  And  he  will  interrupt  a  scene  keyed  to 
that  minor  chord  upon  which  Mr.  Leonard  Merrick 
plays  so  skilfully,  in  The  Bishop's  Comedy  and 
Whispers  About  Women,  to  introduce  burlesque  varia 
tions  as  trivial  and  discordant  as  the  practice  of  a  vil 
lage  band.  Yet  he  is  a  writer  of  great  promise,  of  a 
pleasant  humor,  sweetening  the  bitter  wine  of  irony 
with  a  deathless  faith  in  woman,  making  soft  the 
answers  of  a  somewhat  disillusioned  dreamer  as  he 
notes  the  gay  good-fellowship,  the  homely,  natural 
speech  of  ordinary  men  and  women.  He  has  a  liking 
for  crowds,  an  ear  for  the  apt  phraseology  of  slang, 
an  eye  for  the  unfeigned  gestures  of  every  day. 

He  was  born  on  a  farm  near  Grinnell,  Iowa,  Feb 
ruary  24th,  1883,  his  father,  a  "high-class  farmer/' 
who  had  been  intended  for  the  ministry ;  his  mother,  a 
painter  of  landscapes  and  author  of  children's  stories, 
of  French  descent.  Of  pioneering  stock,  there  is  a 
beat  of  gypsy  music  in  his  heart — and  at  eighteen  he 
ran  away  to  Chicago  from  Springfield,  Missouri, 
where  he  had  finished  high  school,  to  seek  a  fortune 
in  the  great  world.  He  got  a  job  reporting  on  the 
South  Chicago  Daily  Calumet,  became  city  editor,  but 
chance  offering,  left  to  enter  Yale  where  he  was  later 


94  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

editor-in-chief  of  the  Monthly  Magazine.  His  funds 
ran  out,  and  he  was  forced  to  go  to  New  York  to  earn 
a  living.  He  attempted  almost  anything  and  every 
thing  that  offered,  clerking  for  Siegel-Cooper's,  work 
ing  in  bookstores  and  in  a  factory,  but  was  ordered 
West  to  California,  facing  consumption  with  a  bor 
rowed  twenty  dollars,  by  a  doctor  to  whom  a  chance 
friend  had  sent  him.  He  arrived  in  Ogden,  skin  and 
bones,  talking  to  himself,  broke,  the  Oxford  Book  of 
English  Verse  in  his  pocket ;  he  went  to  work  "muck 
ing"  for  the  Northern  Pacific,  contracted  in  a  small 
way,  and  later  returned  to  New  York  to  help  edit 
Transatlantic  Tales — his  poetry  and  short  stories  were 
beginning  to  attract  attention — with  a  strengthened 
physique  and  something  of  a  literary  reputation.  He 
was,  for  a  brief  period,  editor  of  the  Publishers' 
Newspaper  Syndicate,  is  at  present  with  the  Literary 
Digest,  but  for  the  most  part  he  resides  at  Woodstock, 
among  the  hills  of  Central  New  York,  writing  novels. 
And  his  novels  are  extremely  interesting.  Mr. 
Updegraff  has  read  Turgenieff  to  some  purpose.  The 
impudent  exaggeration  of  such  a  fabulous  romance  as, 
in  Second  Youth,  opens  the  eyes  of  the  virginal  (if 
middle-aged)  Mr.  Roland  Francis  to  the  sensual  charm 
of  Mrs.  Adelaide  Winton  Twombly  has  about  it  some 
thing  of  the  piquant  allure  of  continental  intrigue,  the 
colour  of  Flaubert,  the  cynic  gaiety  of  De  Maupassant 
— an  echo,  perhaps,  of  those  crowded  months  when  he 
read  manuscript  and  translated  from  the  French,  Ger 
man  and  Italian — the  result,  certainly,  of  knowing  Tur 
genieff.  Mrs.  Twombly,  grown  contemptuous  of  all 
passion,  real  or  assumed  in  the  selfishness  of  desire, 


ALLAN  UPDEGRAFF  95 

still  smarting1  from  the  brutal  frankness  of  a  too  in 
sistent  husband,  enters  McDavitt's  Department  Store 
ostensibly  to  buy  silks  but  in  reality  to  seduce  the 
heart  of  the  handsome  and  proper  Mr.  Francis  (behind 
the  counter)  with  talk  of  philosophy  and  the  earthi- 
ness  of  worms,  silk  or  what  you  will.  He  is  to  her 
as  the  salesgirl  to  the  young  gallant  in  search  of  a 
"time.'*  He  has  been  waiting,  she  knows,  through  un- 
advancing  years  for  the  True  Romance.  She  will 
(turning  the  tables  on  the  male)  degrade  his  dreams 
to  the  sordid  reality  of  a  fleshy  moment — and  so  be 
avenged  on  the  sex  which  broke  and  disillusioned  her. 
She  fails,  of  course.  When,  in  the  hotel  room,  lip 
should  meet  with  lip  to  seal  a  vain  hope  of  eternal 
faith,  her  courage  deserts  her — and  she  sends  him 
away,  strangely  troubled  by  a  love  he  cannot  realize, 
to  forget  if  he  can,  to  wander  through  the  night  home 
alone.  He  lives  to  encounter  the  various  hazards  that 
beset  an  unattached  bachelor  suddenly  promoted  to  the 
buying  staff  of  a  huge  retail  business — the  interested 
friendship  of  his  widowed  landlady,  the  dinners  of  his 
chief,  the  fluttering  smiles  of  marriageable  daughters; 
but  he  comes  at  long  last  into  a  quiet  place  where  he 
can  rest  with  one  beside  him,  singing  an  old,  old  song 
— a  wilderness  for  you  or  me,  but  for  him  Paradise 
enow. 

Mr.  Updegraff  knows  the  people  of  whom" he  writes, 
nevertheless  his  novels  are  rather  as  a  tale  that  is  told 
than  the  record  of  vivid  experience.  This  is  especially 
noticeable  in  Strayed  Revellers — though  Hen  Hoot, 
the  father  of  Clothilde,  is  "more  directly  lifted  from 
life  than  are  most  characters  in  novels,"  a  farmer,  ex- 


96   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

actly  the  sort  of  person  one  might  wish  for  the  father 
of  an  extremely  modern  young  lady.  Mr.  Updegraff 
is  no  untravelled  Ulysses  coming  suddenly  upon  Circe 
around  the  bend  of  a  mountain  stream  or  among  the 
cloth-banked  aisles  of  a  department  store — yet  his 
chief  persons  are  na'ive,  daring  as  wholesome  children 
are  daring,  dancing  to  unconventional  music  played 
fantastically  upon  a  penny  whistle.  Strayed  Revellers 
is  concerned  with  the  adventure  of  Clothilde  in  search 
of  her  father — her  mother  having  been  married  by  the 
Reverend  Percy  Westbrook,  a  deliverer  from  sin, 
though  she  had  in  a  moment  of  abandon  given  herself 
to  another;  it  is  an  extravaganza,  a  satire  on  the  fads 
of  the  more  advanced  of  Greenwich  Villagers,  a 
romance  dressed  in  the  motley  of  masquerade.  There 
is  about  Clothilde  the  grace  of  all  natural  growing 
things,  the  frank  mischievous  gaiety  of  youth — she  is 
out  of  a  book,  at  once  alive  and  make-believe,  whim 
sical  and  amusing,  an  upland  sprite ;  but  Hen  Hoot  has 
all  the  patient  wisdom  of  Sancho  Panza,  the  reality  of 
rock — Mr.  Updegraff  may  well  be  proud  of  him. 

And  of  his  next  novel.  It  is  yet  in  embryo.  Over 
six  feet  of  immense  build  and  breadth,  for  all  the 
world  like  a  half-brother  to  Mr.  Dreiser,  with  diffident 
averted  gestures,  Mr.  Updegraff  seemed  to  me  rather 
afraid  to  speak  of  his  plans.  He  travels  the  road  Mr. 
Dreiser  travelled  and  knows  how  lacking  in  sympathy 
critics  may  be,  knows  how  long  Mr.  Dreiser  was  in 
finding  himself  and  his  audience.  He  cannot  be  hur 
ried — when  the  time  comes,  he  will  sit  down  and  write 
his  book,  five  or  six  words  a  day,  but  to  a  critic  he 
will  not  disclose  so  much  as  its  name.  He  is  wise. 


CHAPTER  XV 

REX   ELLINGWOOD  BEACH 

A  huge  creature,  hunting  bear  on  Kodiak  Island, 
wrestling  viciously  through  tense,  interminable  hours 
with  his  brother-in-law,  Fred  Stone — bravest,  most 
agile,  most  quaint  of  mimics — buffeting  The  Winds 
of  Chance,  Mr.  Rex  Beach  did  not  set  out  in  life  to 
become  a  writer  of  such  fiction  as  is  consumed  (in 
Menckenian  phrase)  hurriedly,  in  mammoth  gulps,  by 
"fat  women  and  flappers."  He  meant  to  study  law, 
but  (as  he  very  sagely  observes)  he  "had  no  money — 
had  to  find  a  place  to  eat";  and  .  .  . 

He  had  been  born  in  Atwood,  Michigan,  on  Sep 
tember  I,  1877.  At  eighteen,  searching  fortune,  he 
went  up  to  the  city  of  Chicago,  filled  with  a  consuming 
energy,  a  giant  for  strength.  In  those  days  the 
athletic  associations  of  the  larger  cities  maintained 
football  teams  for  the  entertainment  of  the  multitude. 
Young  Beach  had  seen  just  one  game  of  football,  when 
he  presented  himself;  but  his  physical  prowess  being  so 
apparent,  he  was  engaged  without  hesitation  as  tackle. 
The  college  teams  used  to  play  an  annual  series  with 
these  association  professionals — but  later  gave  it  up 
because  the  "truck-horse  professionals'*  (as  I  have 
seen  them  called)  could  not  be  hurt  by  anything  short 
of  an  ax,  while  the  college  players  (as  Mr.  Beach  has 

97 


98   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

said)  were  liable  to  "tear  under  the  wing."  Mr. 
Beach,  however,  played  through  the  season,  taking 
part  in  the  games  which  won  for  his  team  the  cham 
pionship  of  America.  Then,  with  that  insatiable  ap 
petite  for  food,  as  ever  anxious  for  the  conquest  of 
new  worlds,  he  transferred  to  the  swimming  team — 
and  broke  an  indoor  record  at  water  polo. 

All  this  was  in  1897,  the  time  of  the  Klondyke  gold 
rush.  Mr.  Beach  joined  the  hunt,  stampeded  to  the 
Northland,  made  famous  by  himself,  by  Mr.  Service, 
by  the  late  Jack  London,  and  by  the  unbelievable  risks 
and  rewards  of  Alaskan  life.  It  was  the  spirit  of  ad 
venture,  the  bubble  of  youth  bobbing  on  the  waters 
of  life,  that  returned  bread  and  gold  to  the  stay-at- 
home  in  exchange  for  a  prospector's  stake.  The  story 
as  concerns  Mr.  Beach  has  been  told  in  the  Mentor: — 

"With  two  partners  from  Chicago,  Beach  was 
dumped  off  the  boat  at  Rampart,  on  the  Yukon,  one 
rainy  night.  The  three  hadn't  a  dollar  amongst  them, 
but  they  had  plenty  of  goods.  Then  things  began  to 
happen.  'We  prepared  to  become  exorbitantly  rich/ 
in  the  words  of  Beach,  'but  it  was  a  bad  winter.  There 
were  fifteen  hundred  roughnecks  in  town,  very  little 
food,  plenty  of  scurvy.  I  soon  found  that  my  strength 
was  in  my  legs.  I  could  stampede  with  anybody.  So 
I  stampeded  faithfully  whenever  I  heard  of  a  gold 
strike,  all  through  that  winter/  He  became  dissatis 
fied  with  his  two  Chicago  partners,  because  they  pre 
ferred  to  sit  around  the  cabin  cooking  tasty  messes  to 
tearing  through  blizzards  at  the  tail  of  a  dog  team. 
They  wanted  to  wait  for  their  million  dollars  until 


REX  ELLINGWOOD  BEACH  99 

spring,  but  Beach  wanted  his  by  Christmas  at  the 
latest.  And  so  he  set  off,  and  quickly  fell  under  the 
spell  of  the  Yukon.  The  glare  of  the  white  Arctic 
night,  the  toil  of  the  long  trail,  the  complicated  strug 
gle  for  existence,  the  reversion  to  primitive  passions 
inevitable  in  a  new  civilization  in  process  of  formation, 
made  an  imperative  call  to  him,  and  held  him  fas 
cinated.  The  life  about  him  moved  him  to  write,  and 
before  long  he  was  embarked  upon  a  literary  career." 

Pardners,  his  first  story,  was  published  in  1905,  to 
be  followed  by  the  novel  which  gave  him  an  instant  rep 
utation,  The  Spoilers.  Then,  in  1907,  The  Barrier, 
and  in  1909,  The  Silver  Horde — all  dealing,  as  might 
be  expected,  with  Alaskan  life  and  written  primarily 
for  the  yarn  they  spin.  They  have  had  their  day,  but 
in  their  day  they  served  well,  moving  thousands  to 
wonder,  to  consider  and  debate  the  life  of  pioneers,  to 
realize  in  some  sort  the  extent  of  territory  governed 
from  Washington. 

Then  Mr.  Beach  turned  south  and  wrote  The  Ne'er 
Do  Well  with  Panama  and  the  great  canal  as  back 
ground,  and  The  Net  of  New  Orleans  in  Mafia  days. 
The  Auction  Block  (since  become  a  movie)  pictures 
for  the  guileless  the  sale  of  young  girls  into  marriage, 
a  favorite  New  York  amusement  back  in  1914,  but, 
doubtless,  on  protest,  now  discontinued.  The  Iron 
Trail;  The  Heart  of  the  Sunset;  Rainbow's  End;  The 
Crimson  Gardenia;  The  Winds  of  Chance;  Too  Fat  to 
Fight — Mr.  Beach,  now  free  of  his  bondage  to  the 
North,  the  spell  of  the  Yukon  broken,  travels  at  ease 
about  the  world,  writes  plays  when  the  mood  is  on 


loo  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

him  with  the  late  Paul  Armstrong  or  with  Mr.  James 
McArthur,  contributes  to  magazines,  and  has  been  for 
some  time  past  the  earnest  and  hard-working  President 
of  the  Authors'  League  of  America. 

He  is,  unquestionably,  a  force  in  American  letters. 
Too  much,  I  think,  is  made  of  the  verdict  of  posterity. 
Mr.  Beach's  books  may  not  live  forever — I  see  no  rea 
son  why  they  should — but  he  has  humor,  the  rough 
humor  of  Falstaff,  though  without  that  valiant's  wit, 
bubbling  over  in  (which  is  truly  Falstaffian)  Too  Fat 
to  Fight;  he  has  undoubted  strength  and  virility,  and, 
not  knowing  that  in  America  art  is  a  hot-house  plant, 
he  has  flung  wide  the  windows  that,  opening  to  the 
north,  overlook  a  new  world  through  which  he  travels 
a  pioneer.  Surely  one  will  come  after  him  to  make  use 
of  his  discoveries ;  for  he  is  himself  a  romantic  figure 
for  all  the  realism  of  his  novels,  typical  of  the  energy 
and  endurance  of  our  generation. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

UPTON  SINCLAIR 

"It  is  a  fact,"  says  Mr.  Upton  Sinclair,  "that  when 
American  novelists  are  discussed,  my  name  is  system 
atically  omitted."  It  is  also  a  fact  (not  easily  dis 
proved)  that  his  name  appears  here,  with  some  men 
tion  of  his  works;  but  then  I  was  never  yet  systematic 
— and  besides,  Mr.  Sinclair  is  taking  himself  altogether 
too  seriously. 

Let  me  quote  Punch,  that  most  apropos  and  amusing 
of  my  contemporaries,  under  date  of  December  25, 
1918:  "Mrs.  Lambert,  of  Edmonton,  who  is  in  her 
hundred-and- fourth  year,  told  an  Exchange  represen 
tative  that  she  had  never  heard  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George. 
This  is  strange,"  muses  Punch,  "for  we  have  not 
detected  any  conspiracy  to  keep  his  name  out  of  the 
Press." 

Perhaps  not — so  far  as  concerns  Mr.  Lloyd  George. 
But  has  Punch  ever  made  mention  of  Mr.  Upton  Sin 
clair?  Or  heard  of  him — for  it  is  just  barely  possible 
that  there  be  some  who  have  not?  Concerning  Mr. 
Sinclair  there  is  a  conspiracy — I  have  his  word  for  it. 
"It  is  a  fact,"  says  Mr.  Sinclair,  "that  New  York  City's 
leading  newspaper  has  a  rule  that  articles  about  me 
and  articles  written  by  me  are  not  admitted  to  its  col 
umns;  I  was  told  this  personally  by  two  different  edi- 

101 


w  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 


tors  to  whom  such  orders  were  given."  (I  can  sym 
pathize  with  Mr.  Sinclair  in  his  delusion  ;  I  firmly  be 
lieve  that  there  is  some  such  rule  applying  to  me,  en 
forced  not  only  by  "New  York  City's  leading  news 
paper'*  but  by  every  newspaper  in  the  country;  I  find 
scant  mention  of  my  doings  in  the  Press,  though  I  am 
rapidly  emerging  from  the  mass  as  a  notorious  char 
acter.) 

But  Mr.  Sinclair  is,  of  course,  a  troublesome  person, 
with  his  strange  hallucinations,  his  sense  of  duty,  his 
air  of  injured  martyr.  He  doubtless  annoys  the  aver 
age  editor;  he  annoys  me  at  times.  Yet  there  is  no 
denying  the  power  of  his  pen,  pointed  as  a  lance 
probing  for  secret  ills,  sharpened  to  some  purpose 
with  a  constant  use,  guided  by  a  well-nigh  fearless 
hand.  Dr.  George  Brandes  once  referred  to  him  as 
a  favorite  of  his,  one  of  three  Americans  whose  novels 
he  has  found  worth  reading  —  and  Dr.  Brandes  is  a 
critic  capable  beyond  all  reasoning  belief.  Mr. 
Clement  Wood  insists  that  "if  the  great  American 
novel  has  been  written,  it  is  Mr.  Sinclair's  Jungle;  for 
no  greater  work  of  fiction,  especially  from  the  social 
standpoint  as  opposed  to  the  individual,  has  yet  been 
produced  among  us  —  in  his  writing  and  in  his  living  he 
has  earned  the  right  to  be  classed  among  the  few  pre 
eminent  American  voices  speaking  for  social  justice 
and  a  better  world."  Mr.  Sinclair  has  written  ably, 
if  with  no  proper  sense  of  emphasis,  concerning  certain 
phases  of  American  life  —  and  he  has  his  readers  no 
less  enamoured  than  those  of  Mr.  Shaw  or  Mrs. 
Porter.  For  my  part  I  read  primarily  for  the  fun  of 
reading,  and  I  confess  Mr.  Sinclair  tires  me  (now  and 


UPTON  SINCLAIR  103 

again)  with  his  raucous  bellowing  before  some  ill- 
ventilated  tenement,  his  easy  sardonic  smile,  his  over 
played  sympathy  with  the  poor.  Life  is  a  compromise 
at  best,  but  Mr.  Sinclair  will  hear  of  no  armistice — we 
must  have  war  eternally  with  the  forces  of  privilege, 
wealth,  leisure,  until  the  last  worker  returns  laden  with 
the  fruit  of  his  labor  from  a  vineyard  that  shall  be 
Eden  in  all  but  name.  I  shall  be  dead  long  ere  the 
dawning  of  that  promised  day,  and  I  am  no  mono 
maniac.  Mr.  Sinclair  interests  me,  primarily  because 
he  knows  how  to  write,  not  because  he  writes  of  an 
oppressed  and  heart-sick  world. 

But  he  comes  of  a  fighting  stock.  His  immediate 
ancestors  served  in  the  United  States  navy;  their 
fathers  were  with  the  British.  The  Civil  War  swept 
away  the  family  fortunes.  Into  a  somewhat  empty 
home,  with  no  money,  of  fine  Southern  traditions,  in 
Baltimore,  Mr.  Sinclair  was  born,  September  20,  1878. 
He  emerged  slowly,  rising  out  of  his  environment, 
doing  hack-fiction  to  pay  his  way  through  the  College 
of  the  City  of  New  York,  graduating  1897,  and  post- 
gra3uating  four  years  at  Columbia.  Before  he  was 
twenty-one  (so  he  has  often  said),  his  work  bulked  as 
large  as  a  complete  set  of  Waverley.  His  first  novel, 
Springtime  and  Harvest,  appeared  when  he  was 
twenty-three ;  The  Journal  of  Arthur  Stirling,  a  poetic 
narrative  of  the  man  condemned  to  death  by  poverty 
and  a  belief  in  his  ideals,  two  years  later.  Prince 
Hag  en,  fairy-tale  of  the  gold-mad  world,  came  the 
same  year,  to  be  later  dramatized  and  included  as  one 
of  his  four  Plays  of  Protest.  The  next  year, 
Manassas,  one  of  the  best  of  Mr.  Sinclair's  books, 


104  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

though  little  known — "a  Civil  War  novel/'  says  Mr. 
Wood,  "immeasurably  better  than  the  cheap  medioc 
rity  of  the  best  of  the  Winston  Churchill  war  books," 
though  why  this  sudden  fury  against  the  always  af 
fable  Mr.  Churchill  I,  for  one,  cannot  guess. 

In  1906  appeared  The  Jungle.  And  in  1906  Mr. 
Sinclair  assisted  in  the  government  investigation  of  the 
Chicago  stockyards.  Mr.  Sinclair  had  made  the  pack 
ing  town  his  home,  "and  got  at  first  hand  the  sordid 
bloodiness,  the  sorrowful  filth,  the  torturing  toil  of  the 
thousands  of  hopeless  serfs  rotting  to  pile  up  dividends 
for  the  meat  lords."  (I  again  quote  from  Mr.  Wood, 
evidently  a  friendly  critic,  one  to  do  justice  to  his 
author.)  But  no  more  remarkable  tale  of  labor's  suf 
fering,  of  the  aches  of  eyes  that  strain  to  look  from 
darkness  towards  the  light,  of  brute  submission,  inar 
ticulate  and  patient  slow  death,  was  ever  written.  "The 
pages  reread  to-day,"  says  Mr.  Wood,  "wring  the 
heart."  And  if  you  have  never  read  that  book  you 
can  never  know  from  what  it  was  Chicago  rose  to  boast 
herself  two  million  strong.  "It  hit  even  the  bourgeois 
in  their  tenderest  spot — the  stomach;  some  observer 
has  said  that  it  gave  a  nation  the  stomach-ache.  .  .  « 

"Book  after  book  followed,  each  laying  open  one 
of  the  fester  spots  of  moribund  capitalistic  society. 
The  Industrial  Republic  is  a  prophetic  study  of  ten 
years  hence.  The  Overman  pictures  the  higher  pos 
sibilities  of  the  spirit;  The  Metropolis  uncovered  the 
decay  in  the  New  York  smart  set;  The  Money 
Changers  attacked  the  financial  over-lordship  of  the 
country;  and  another  of  the  Plays  of  Protest,  The 
Machine,  is  a  withering  indictment  of  the  vicious 


UPTON  SINCLAIR  105 

alliance  between  politics,  finance  and  commercialized 
vice;  Samuel  the  Seeker  is  a  simple  fictional  explana 
tion  of  Socialism;  Love's  Pilgrimage,  another  of  Mr. 
Sinclair's  finer  books,  a  treatment  of  love  and  the  home 
relationship,  with  a  caustic  understanding ;  Sylvia  con 
tinued  this;  and  his  latest  novel,  King  Coal,  seeks  to 
do  for  the  despotic  feudalism  of  the  Western  mining, 
camps  what  The  Jungle  did  -for  the  packing  hells." 

A  formidable  and  gallant  achievement.  Forty 
years  old  he  is,  "and  I  have  supported  myself  since  I 
was  fifteen,"  he  will  tell  you,  "always  with  my  pen. 
Since  the  age  of  twenty  I  have  written  exclusively  in 
the  cause  of  human  welfare,  nearly  all  my  writing 
being  part  of  the  class  war.  I  was  able  to  say  to  a 
newspaper  man  the  other  day  that  in  those  years  I 
have  never  written  a  line  I  did  not  believe.  I  have 
written  many  lines  which  were  below  my  best  from  a 
literary  standpoint,  for  I  have  been  ill  part  of  the 
time,  and  poor  most  of  the  time;  but  I  have  stood  by 
my  faith,  such  as  it  was  and  is.  I  have  won  much 
notoriety,  and  possibly  a  little  fame ;  also  I  have  made 
a  good  deal  of  money.  I  made  thirty  thousand  dollars 
out  of  one  book,  and  proceeded  at  once  to  invest  it 
in  a  Socialist  colony,  so  organized  I  had  no  possibility 
of  making  money  out  of  it;  it  burned  down,  and  I  lost 
nearly  everything  and  started  again.  The  next  time 
I  was  on  my  feet,  I  launched,  here  in  California"  (he 
lives  in  Pasadena),  "a  Socialist  dramatic  enterprise, 
again  without  possibility  of  profit;  and  when  I  had 
got  out  of  debt  from  that,  I  went  in  a  third  time,  trying 
to  get  justice,  or  a  tiny  modicum  of  it,  for  the  slaves 
of  the  Colorado  coal  mines.  .  .  .  Before  my  literary 


io6  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

success  I  lived  in  New  York  on  four  dollars  and  a  half 
a  week,  and  later  I  supported  a  wife  and  child  on 
thirty  a  month.  Since  my  success  I  have  taken  a 
living  out  of  my  work;  but  the  taking  has  generally 
been  behind  the  living — that  is  to  say,  I  have  spent 
more  on  causes  than  I  had  at  the  time.  I  have  never 
owned  an  automobile — not  even  a  Ford.  I  once 
owned  a  saddle  horse,  as  a  matter  of  health;  but  at 
present  I  ride  a  bicycle,  for  which  I  paid  ten  dollars 
second-hand.  ...  So  here,  behold  me,  a  bug  impaled 
on  a  pin  for  study;  a  specimen  of  the  agitator  auri- 
•ferens,  popularly  described  as  'parlor  Socialist/ r 

Mr.  Sinclair's  latest  book  just  announced  is  Jimmie 
Higgins.  And  this  spring,  true  to  form,  he  published 
The  Profits  of  Religion,  a  cunning  juggling  of  words, 
a  furious  assault  upon  and  arraignment  of  the  estab 
lished  churches.  Mr.  Sinclair  feigns  to  see  in  the 
ordinary  country  parson,  in  the  deacon  who  on  idle 
afternoons  visits  among  the  poor,  in  the  bishop  who 
lends  tone  to  my  lady's  garden  party,  depraved  and 
gold-seeking  parasites,  drones  hiving  upon  society, 
leeches  fattening  upon  the  people  whom  they  have 
drugged  with  superstition.  Making  money,  a  la  Billy 
Sunday,  seems  to  Mr.  Sinclair  the  worst  of  crimes. 
It  is  no  worse  than  making  money  out  of  books  or 
sausages — religion  is  as  necessary  to  life  as  either. 
By  jove,  if  the  pen  were  mightier  than  the  sword,  Mr. 
Sinclair  would  have  destroved  his  generation  long  ago. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

HENRY  BLAKE  FULLER 

"It  was  the  Chevalier  of  Pensieri-Vani  who  halted 
his  traveling-carriage  upon  the  brow  of  the  Ciminian 
Forest  to  look  down  over  the  wide-spread  Campagna 
di  Roma.  ...  In  the  year  1873— No,  do  not  turn 
away  from  such  an  opening;  I  shall  reach  our  own 
day  within  a  paragraph  or  so." 

There  is  twenty-seven  years  of  experience  with  life 
and  literature  separating  those  two  sentences,  one  be 
ginning  Mr.  Fuller's  first  novel,  The  Chevalier  of  Pen- 
sieri-Vani,  and  the  other  his  latest,  On  the  Stairs. 
Mr.  Fuller's  work  shows  a  constant  growth,  and 
"within  a  paragraph  or  so"  ...  he  says.  I  wonder 
...  if  he  ever  will  ...  if  he  ever  can;  we  are  so  far 
removed  from  1873.  We  grow  old  apace  and  have 
well-nigh  forgotten  the  horseman  who,  at  a  gallop, 
topped  the  opening  page  of  every  romance  written 
during  the  mock-heroic  reign  of  the  good  Sir  Walter. 
Stevenson?  "Full  of  strange  oaths,  jealous  in  honor, 
sudden,  and  quick  in  quarrel  ?"  His  bubble  reputation 
burst  in  the  Canon's  mouth  when  last  my  Lord  Arch 
bishop  took  to  discussing  Shaw  and  Wells.  "In  this 
modern  industrial  civilization  of  which  we  are  wont 
to  boast,  a  certain  glacier-like  process  may  be  ob 
served,"  says  Mr.  Winston  Churchill — and  there  you 

107 


io6   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

have  the  key-note  of  the  "modern"  novel,  Mr. 
Churchill's  latest,  a  thing  of  sound  and  fury,  signifying 
that  .  .  .  Romance  is  dead?  But  how  really  far  we 
have  travelled  with  our  aeroplanes  and  motors  since 
first  we  came,  at  a  sudden  turn  of  the  page,  upon  that 
poor  gentleman,  the  Chevalier,  in  his  halted  chaise, 
the  hasty  promise  of  Mr.  Fuller's  second  sentence 
amply  attests;  we  are  no  longer  interested  in  the 
memoirs  of  dead  days,  the  clash  of  sword  on  battered 
shield,  the  loves  of  Aucassin — or  so  our  author  pre 
sumes.  And  'tis  presumption,  for  I  swear  Monsieur 
France  as  up-to-the-minute  when  he  tells  of  Pontius 
Pilate — "Jesus?"  murmur  a-t-il  I  "Jesus,  de  Nazareth? 
Je  ne  me  rapelle  pas" — as  ever  Mr.  Samuel  Hopkins 
Adams  with  his  anti-German  Common  Cause,  or  Mr. 
Upton  Sinclair  with  King  Coal  and  the  misery  of  Colo 
rado  miners.  If  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  be  like 
unto  a  mustard  seed,  this  little  old  world  is  an  oyster 
for  the  sword  of  swaggering  Ancients — beneath  a  sea 
of  troubles  the  food  for  prince  and  knave ;  and  though 
it  seem  (to  the  casual  eye)  constantly  moving,  chang 
ing,  yet  is  it  ever  the  same — beneath  the  surface  the 
mystery  of  life.  As  it  was  in  the  beginning,  so  it 
will  be  when  journeys  end — a  lover's  meeting  .  .  . 
with  a  heigh-ho,  the  wind  and  the  rain. 

But  motley  is  no  wear  for  Mr.  Fuller.  In  The 
Chatelaine  of  La  Trinite  he  joins  his  realist  romancer, 
Fin  de  Siecle,  to  search  for  the  soul  enshrined  in  a 
woman's  body;  in  his  writing  he  seeks  to  express  the 
spirit  of  life  beautifully  within  the  compass  of  a 
slowly-to-be-perfected  art.  "As  may  be  gathered," 
he  writes,  in  answering  my  queries,  "I  am  as  much 


HENRY  BLAKE  FULLER  109 

concerned  with  form  and  technique  as  with  any  of  the 
other  elements  involved  in  fiction:  all  the  more  so 
because  these  two  features  seem  to  be  increasingly  dis 
regarded  by  the  ordinary  reader."  As  a  critic  I  honor 
him  for  his  concern  with  the  form  and  technique  of  a 
medium  too  often  debased  by  the  careless  haste  of 
artisans — "I  wrote  Queed  entire,  from  the  first  vague 
gropings  for  ideas  to  the  consignment  of  the  manu 
script  to  the  express  office,  in  a  little  over  four 
months,"  boasts  Mr.  Henry  Sydnor  Harrison,  and 
four  months  later  .  .  .  !  But  as  a  reader — my  dear 
Mr.  Fuller,  it  is  no  part  of  the  ordinary  reader's  busi 
ness  to  puzzle  out  your  means  to  an  artistic  end.  Pro 
duce  your  effects,  your  Tuscan  post-roads,  your 
crowded  ball-rooms,  your  crimson  sunsets,  the  lark 
that  heralds  in  the  dawn;  and  we  will  ask  no  ques 
tions.  Never  mind  the  Why  and  Wherefore;  we  will 
disregard  your  spelling,  forget  your  old-world  punc 
tuation,  renounce  a  life  of  critical  sagacity,  if  you  but 
lead  us  (whither  you  will)  into  some  momentary 
fairyland.  For  there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  pure 
method  in  the  novel;  neither  realism  nor  romance, 
only  the  artistic  blending  of  the  two. 

But  Mr.  Fuller  is  an  experimentalist.  "I  have  been 
helping  my  friend,  Miss  Harriet  Monroe,  of  Poetry" 
he  writes,  "as  one  of  her  advisory  committee;  and 
during  the  earlier  days  I  helped  her  on  proofs  and 
looked  after  some  of  the  routine  of  her  printing.  The 
atmosphere  of  'free  verse'  prompted  me  to  try  some 
free  verse  myself,  as  applied  to  the  short  story;  hence 
Lines  Long  and  Short  (1917).  Then  the  vogue  of 
the  long  and  amorphous  novel  led  me  to  revive  my 


110  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

novel-writing  (after  a  lapse  of  some  years)  in  a 
briefer,  compacter  form;  hence  On  the  Stairs  (1918) 
— together  with  my  discussions  of  the  matter  in  The 
Dial" 

"The  long  and  amorphous  novel."  Is  he  referring 
to  Dreiser?  "Turn  to  page  703  of  The  Genius" 
says  Mr.  Mencken.  "By  the  time  one  gets  there,  one 
has  hewn  and  hacked  one's  way  through  702  large 
pages  of  fine  print — 97  long  chapters,  more  than 
250,000  words.  And  yet,  at  this  hurried  and  impatient 
point,  with  the  coda  already  begun,  Dreiser  halts  the 
whole  narrative  to  explain  the  origin,  nature  and  inner 
meaning  of  Christian  Science,  and  to  make  us  privy 
to  a  lot  of  chatty  stuff  about  Mrs.  Althea  Jones,  a  pro 
fessional  healer,  and  to  supply  us  with  detailed  plans 
and  specifications  of  the  apartment  house  in  which 
she  lives,  works  her  tawdry  miracles,  and  has  her 
being.  ...  A  Dreiser  novel,  at  least  of  the  later 
canon,  cannot  be  read  as  other  novels  are  read — on  a 
winter  evening  or  summer  afternoon,  between  meal 
and  meal,  travelling  from  New  York  to  Boston.  It 
demands  the  attention  for  almost  a  week,  and  uses 
up  the  faculties  for  a  month."  But  this  is  equally  true 
of  George  Meredith,  though  his  novels  are  not  one  half 
so  long;  unless  you  be  sane  above  the  ordinary,  with 
great  powers  of  assimilation,  it  is  not  advisable  to 
gulp  him  down  at  a  single  sitting.  Yet  the  whole  dif 
ference  is  not  that  Mr.  Fuller  is  an  infinitely  finer 
artist  than  either  George  Meredith  or  Dreiser  or  Tol 
stoy  (for  that  matter),  but  that  he  writes,  in  Chicago, 
for  a  hurried  and  impatient  people,  whereas  Meredith, 
Dreiser,  Tolstoy  wrote  for  those  who  have  a  genuine 


HENRY  BLAKE  FULLER  in 

curiosity,  concerning  the  human  fancy,  a  seasoned 
pleasure  in  books. 

Yet  for  all  this  absorbing  interest  in  the  forms  of 
art,  Mr.  Fuller  takes  high  rank  among  the  novelists 
of  our  day  and  generation.  With  the  Procession  and 
The  Cliff -Dwellers  are  still  kindly  remembered,  after 
twenty-five  years,  by  Mr.  Huneker  and  by  Mr. 
Mencken.  In  The  Cliff-Dwellers  he  first  created 
flesh  and  blood  women,  Mrs.  Cecilia  Ingals  and  Miss 
Cornelia  McDodd,  and  they  have  ably  withstood  the 
torment  of  time.  He  may,  indeed,  in  some  sort,  be 
said  to  have  discovered  Chicago  in  that  book — and,  in 
return,  Chicago  has  done  much  to  develop  his  talent. 

He  was  born  in  Chicago,  January  Qth,  1857.  His 
family  had  been  established  in  the  city  for  two  genera 
tions  before  him — his  grandfather,  Henry  Fuller, 
being  one  of  the  pioneers  that  gathered  around  Fort 
Dearborn.  His  remote  ancestors  were  English  on 
both  sides;  his  father's  family  reaching  New  Eng 
land  soon  after  the  Mayflower,  and  his  mother's  im 
mediately  after  the  War  of  1812.  He  started  life  in 
tending  to  become  a  composer,  but,  above  all,  with 
the  determination  of  supporting  himself,  although  his 
father  and  his  grandfather  were  merchants  of  the 
highest  social  and  commercial  standing,  their  fortunes 
growing  as  the  city  grew.  Yet  he  served  as  a  book 
keeper,  fostering  his  love  of  music  and  saving  enough 
money  for  a  two  years'  visit  to  Italy.  There  was  born 
the  idea  of  The  Chevalier  of  Pensieri-Vani,  to  be 
written  at  odd  moments  here  and  there,  and  stuffed 
away  in  a  trunk,  a  jumble  of  rough  notes,  to  be  res 
cued  and  to  make  a  dreary  round  of  the  publishers,  a 


112   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

vain  and  dismal  business,  and  finally  to  be  brought 
out  at  his  own  cost  by  the  author.  It  won  immediate 
and  high  praise  from  the  discerning;  it  has  an  endur 
ing  place  in  old  affections — and  they  are  loyal.  The 
dilettante  Chevalier,  with  his  doubtful  Madonna,  his 
unhappily  genuine  Contessa,  lodging  above  the  Arno — 
in  a  fit  of  despondency  he  was  forced  to  write  himself 
down  a  failure,  yet  is  he  delightful,  sufficient  unto  his 
hour. 

"I  was  in  Europe  in  1879-80,"  writes  Mr.  Fuller, 
"in  '83,  '92,  '94  and  '97.  These  trips  supplemented 
some  schooling  in  Chicago  and  in  a  Wisconsin  acad 
emy.  During  these  later  years  I  have  had  to  keep 
in  America  and  almost  altogether  in  Chicago,  where 
practical  concerns  have  often  been  unfavorable  to 
literary  production.  This  circumscribed  locus — to 
gether  with  the  changes  naturally  brought  by  time 
itself — will  account,  I  suppose,  for  certain  alterations 
in  field  and  in  themes."  Perhaps  ...  yet  "Fuller's 
disappearance  is  one  of  the  strangest  phenomena  of 
American  letters,"  says  Mr.  Mencken.  "I  was 
astonished  some  time  ago  to  discover  that  he  was  still 
alive.  Back  in  1899  he  was  already  so  far  forgotten 
that  William  Archer  mistook  his  name,  calling  him 
Henry  Y.  Puller.  Vide  Archer's  pamphlet,  The 
American  Language:  New  York,  1899." 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

JAMES  BRANCH  CABELL 

"I  cannot  imagine  a  more  ghastly  task  than  that 
which  confronts  you,"  said  Mr.  Cabell  in  the  long  ago 
when  I  was  brave :  "I  await  the  outcome  with  no  less 
sympathy  than  interest/' 

I  thought  to  deal  critically  with  the  hosts  of  men 
who  make  our  novels,  to  tell  of  their  lives,  their  way 
of  work  and  play.  I  learned,  to  what  may  prove  my 
undoing,  that  it  is  impossible  for  one  man  to  read  their 
novels,  let  alone  retain  reason  enough  to  write  of  them. 
For  if  you  delight  in  The  Rivet  in  Grandfather's  Neck 
(an  intriguing  title),  you  cannot  possibly  away  with 
more  than  a  little  of  Mr.  Winston  Churchill  and  the 
fury  of  Mr.  Samuel  Hopkins  Adams,  belaboring  the 
press,  will  be  a  sound  signifying  almost  nothing  to  you. 
For  if  you  delight  in  The  Rivet  in  Grandfather's  Neck 
— 'tis  almost  a  confession  of  faith. 

The  Rivet  in  Grandfather's  Neck  tells  of  Colonel 
Rudolph  Musgrave  and  of  the  girl,  Patricia  Vartrey 
(a  second  cousin  once  removed),  who  came  visiting 
in  his  house  at  Lichfield  in  Virginia.  She  was  en 
gaged  to  an  earl,  and  yet.  .  .  .  For  at  least  a  decade 
the  Colonel  had  been  invaluable  to  Lichfield  matrons 
alike  against  the  entertainment  of  an  "out-of-town 
girl/'  the  management  of  a  cotillion  and  the  preven- 

112 


114   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

tion  of  unpleasant  pauses  among  incongruous  dinner 
guests.  He  was  by  all  accounts  the  social  triumph 
of  his  generation.  Perhaps  he  entertained  her.  They 
seem  to  have  fallen  in  love.  "At  worst/'  he  had  been 
reflecting  before  she  came,  "at  worst  I  can  make  love 
to  her.  They,  as  a  rule,  take  kindly  to  that;  and  in 
the  exercise  of  hospitality  a  host  must  go  to  all  lengths 
to  divert  his  guests.  Failure  is  not  permitted." 
.  .  .  And  then  she  came.  She  came  to  him  across 
the  trim,  cool  lawn,  leisurely,  yet  with  a  resilient  tread 
that  attested  the  vigor  of  her  slim  young  body.  She 
was  all  in  white.  .  .  .  "Failure  is  not  permitted,"  he 
was  repeating  to  himself.  .  .  .  "You're  Cousin 
Rudolph?"  she  asked.  "How  perfectly  entrancing! 
You  see  until  to-day  I  always  thought  that  if  I  had 
been  offered  the  choice  between  having  cousins  or 
appendicitis  I  would  have  preferred  to  be  operated 
on."  .  .  .  And  Colonel  Musgrave  noted  that  her  hair 
was  really  like  the  reflection  of  a  sunset  in  rippling 
waters,  and  that  her  mouth  was  an  inconsiderable 
trifle,  a  scrap  of  sanguine  curves,  and  that  her  eyes 
were  purple  glimpses  of  infinity.  They  fell  in  love, 
and  what  became  of  the  earl  is  not  at  all  another 
story  but  concerns  them  intimately,  for  they  married. 
And  they  were,  to  all  outward  seeming,  quite  happy. 
It  is  of  their  happiness  that  Mr.  Cabell  tells — and  of 
the  serpents  in  Eden.  Also  something  of  the  Colonel's 
past,  and  of  Mr.  Charteris,  a  novelist  and  part  author 
with  Mr.  Cabell  of  Beyond  Life,  and  of  Anne  Char 
teris,  his  wife,  and  of  the  Colonel's  son  who  was  also 
Patricia's  son — and  of  the  death  of  Charteris  who  had 


JAMES  BRANCH  CABELL  115 

thought  to  be  lover  to  Patricia,  and  of  the  death  of 
Patricia,  and  of  the  death  of  Colonel  Musgrave. 

"I  question  whether  wickedness  is  possible  to  hu 
manity  outside  of  literature,"  says  John  Charteris  in 
Beyond  Life.     "In  books,  of  course,  may  be  encoun 
tered  any  number  of  competently  evil  people  who  take 
a  proper  pride  in  their  depravity.     But  in  life  men  go 
wrong  without  dignity  and  sin,  as  it  were,  from  hand 
to  mouth."     Charteris  himself  sins  without  shame  and 
with  something  of  that  gaiety  which  makes  of  Bottom, 
though  he  roar,  a  lover  on  whom  fairies  are  swift  to 
wait.     "Let  us  forget  the  crudities  of  life,"  he  pleads, 
"and  say  foolish  things  to  each  other.     For  I  am  pas- 
torally  inclined,  Patricia;  I  wish  to  lie  at  yotfr  feet  and 
pipe  amorous  ditties  upon  an  oaten  reed.     Have  you 
no  such  article  about  you,  Patricia?"     He  draws  a 
key-ring  from  his  pocket,  and,  like  the  fool  in  the 
forest,  looks  upon  it  with  lack-lustre  eye.     "Or  would 
you  prefer  that  I  whistle  into  the  opening  of  this  door- 
key,  to  the  effect  that  we  must  gather  our  rose-buds 
while  we  may,  for  Time  is  still  a-flying,  fa-la,  and  that 
a  drear  old  age,  not  to  mention  our  spouses,  will  soon 
descend  upon  us,  f a-la-di-leero  ?"     But  she  protests, 
with  an  indulgent   smile :     "Don't  be   foolish,   mon 
ami!     I  am  unhappy." 

As  indeed  she  is.  We  are  all  of  us  unhappy  when 
we  love,  unhappy  while  we  live — though  we  may  ex 
ist,  contented,  without  unhappiness.  And  Charteris, 
though  he  laughs,  is  disappointed  with  the  scheme  of 
things,  with  the  folly  of  fact,  the  achievements  of 
romance.  Mr.  Cabell  himself  sees  no  way  out,  bids 


Ii6   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

us  live  (if  we  can)  in  dreams,  forgetting  reality;  and 
in  The  Cream  of  the  Jest.  .  .  . 

The  Cream  of  the  Jest  concerns  one  Felix  Kennas- 
ton,  a  Virginia  gentleman  of  means  and  imagination, 
who,  while  walking  in  his  garden  at  twilight,  plotting 
the  final  chapters  of  a  novel  that  should  commemorate 
the  high-hearted  story  of  Guiron  and  Etarre,  stooped 
to  pick  up  a  shining  bit  of  metal  that  lay  beside  the 
pathway,  conscious  of  a  vague  notion  that  he  had  just 
dropped  that  bit  of  metal.  Later  he  was  destined  to 
puzzle  over  his  inability  to  recollect  what  motive  had 
prompted  him  to  slip  this  glittering  trifle  into  his 
pocket.  Later,  by  long  gazing  at  it,  he  was  able  to 
hypnotize  himself  and  so  put  off  the  gross  life  of  the 
flesh,  becoming,  almost  at  will,  the  creature  of  his 
fancies.  But  that  night  he  dined  alone  with  his  wife, 
sharing  a  taciturn  meal.  He  and  Kathleen  talked  of 
very  little,  now,  save  the  existent  day's  small  happen 
ings,  of  seeing  So-and-so,  and  of  So-and-so's  having 
said  this  or  that.  But  soon  he  was  contentedly  labor 
ing,  in  the  solitude  of  his  library,  upon  the  book  he  had 
always  intended  to  write — The  Audit  at  Storisende, 
or,  rather,  Men  Who  Loved  Alison,  as  before  publica 
tion  the  novel  came  to  be  called.  This  book  was  to  be 
different  from  any  of  his  previous  compositions.  This 
book  was  different,  for,  though  the  tale  was  set  in  that 
happy,  harmless  Fable-land  bounded  by  Avalon  and 
Phcecia  and  Sea-coast  Bohemia,  in  the  writing  it  all 
seemed  real  to  Kennaston — far  more  real,  indeed,  than 
the  life  his  body  was  aimlessly  shuffling  through. 
"Some  few  there  must  be  in  every  age  and  every  land," 
says  Mr.  Cabell  in  the  Auctorial  Induction  to  The  Cer- 


JAMES  BRANCH  CABELL  117 

tain  Hour,  "of  whom  life  claims  nothing  very  insist 
ently  save  that  they  write  perfectly  of  beautiful  hap 
penings."  Of  these  few  Felix  Kennaston  is  one;  and 
Mr.  Cabell — though  I  speak  with  no  authority,  I  take  it 
that  Mr.  Cabell  is  another. 

Mr.  Cabell  has  been  writing  for  the  past  fifteen 
years,  and  yet  (as  has  been,  perhaps,  too  often  pointed 
out)  his  name  is  almost  unknown  to  the  ordinary  pas 
time  seeking  reader.  He  was  born  in  Richmond  in  Vir 
ginia,  April  14,  1879,  tne  son  °f  Robert  Gamble  Cabell 
and  his  wife,  Anne  Branch  Cabell.  He  received  his 
early  education  in  Richmond,  and,  in  1898,  graduated 
from  the  College  of  William  and  Mary,  where  he 
had  been  for  some  time  an  undergraduate  instructor 
in  French  and  Greek.  He  then  worked  in  the  press 
room  of  the  Richmond  Times,  and,  from  1899  to  1901, 
on  the  New  York  Herald,  returning  to  Richmond  and 
the  city  staff  of  the  Richmond  News  in  the  latter  year. 
In  1902  he  quit  the  newspaper  game,  until  1910  writ 
ing  for  various  magazines  some  sixty  short  stories,  to 
gether  with  various  translations,  verses,  essays  and 
historical  and  genealogical  studies.  In  1904  the  first 
of  his  novels,  The  Eagle's  Shadow,  was  published. 
He  has  spent  some  time  traveling  in  France,  America, 
Ireland  and  England;  he  has  published  three  volumes 
of  Virginia  genealogy;  he  has  been  historian  of  the 
Virginia  Society  of  Colonial  Wars  and  of  the  Virginia 
Society  of  the  Sons  of  American  Revolution.  From 
1911-13  he  was  coal  mining  in  West  Virginia.  Since 
his  marriage  in  1913,  he  has  lived  (for  the  most  part) 
at  Dumbarton  Grange,  Dumbarton,  Virginia.  There, 
though  a  figure  of  some  importance  in  the  social  and 


Ii8   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

intellectual  life  of  the  community,  he  spends  his  days 
in  writing,  his  evenings  reading. 

"My  books  must  stand  for  my  biography,"  he  says. 
"My  personality  is,  even  to  me,  entirely  devoid  of  in 
terest.  My  life  has  been  uneventful  and,  to  the  by 
stander,  colorless.  My  philosophy,  such  as  it  is,  I 
have  endeavored  to  voice  in  my  books.  For  the  rest, 
I  would  say  that  in  Beyond  Life  you  will  find  opinions 
upon  pretty  much  any  topic.  I  warn  you,  though, 
that  I  decline  to  endorse  the  views  of  Mr.  Charteris. 
Such  as  they  are,  I  present  them;  that  is  all." 

Eight  of  Mr.  Cabell's  twelve  published  books  are 
fiction.  They  are: 

The  Certain  Hour,  The  Soul  of  Melicent,  The  Rivet 
in  Grandfather's  Neck,  Chivalry,  The  Cords  of  Van 
ity,  Gallantry,  The  Line  of  Love,  The  Eagle's  Shadow. 

Jurgen,  his  latest  work  of  fiction,  has  been  written 
and  is  announced  for  early  publication. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

ROBERT   WILLIAM    CHAMBERS 

Of  Robert  W.  Chambers  I  read:  "What  impresses 
one  most  about  Mr.  Robert  W.  Chambers  is  his  amaz 
ing  versatility.  In  addition  to  being  a  popular  novel 
ist,  he  is  an  expert  on  rare  rugs,  an  artist,  and  so  well 
qualified  a  judge  of  fine  art  that  he  can  talk  intelli 
gently  to  the  curators  and  directors  of  museums  about 
the  old  masters  on  exhibition  there;  equipped  with  an 
understanding  of  Chinese  and  Japanese  antiques  so 
that  he  can  detect  forgeries  in  that  art;  an  authority 
on  armour;  a  lover  of  outdoors,  of  horses,  dogs,  and 
an  ardent  collector  of  butterflies;  and,  in  addition,  a 
thorough  man  of  the  world,  who  knows  Paris  and 
Petrograd,  and  many  of  the  out-of-the-way  corners  of 
the  earth.  These  are  the  qualities  that  come  to  mind 
readily,  but  the  list  is  far  from  complete.  The  longer 
one  knows  Mr.  Chambers,  the  more  varied  the  knowl 
edge  he  finds  in  him/' 

Now  let  me  quote  from  Mr.  Joseph  Pennell's  Life 
of  James  McNeil!  Whistler: 

"When  Whistler  came  to  England,  art  was  the 
Academy,  an  Academy  that  had  strangled  the  tradi 
tions  of  art  and  set  up  sentiment  and  anecdote. 
Wilkie  explained  the  ideal  of  the  nineteenth-century 
Academician  when  he  said  that  'to  know  the  taste  of 

119 


120   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

the  public — to  learn  what  will  best  please  the  em 
ployer — is,  to  an  artist,  the  most  valuable  of  all  knowl 
edge/  .  .  .  Every  taste  was  catered  to.  Everybody 
would  understand,  and  art  had  never  been  so  popular 
in  England.  The  Academy  became  a  social  power. 
As  art  was  the  last  thing  looked  for  on  the  walls,  so 
the  artist  was  the  last  thing  looked  for  in  the  Acad 
emician.  The  situation  was  summed  up  in  Whistler's 
reply  to  a  group  of  ladies  who  were  praising  Lord 
Leighton  (President  of  the  Royal  Academy) :  'He 
is  such  a  wonderful  musician!  such  a  gallant  colonel! 
such  a  brilliant  orator!  such  a  dignified  President! 
such  a  charming  host!  such  an  amazing  linguist!' 
they  chorused.  'H'm,  paints,  too,  don't  he?'  asked 
Whistler." 

American  letters  are  in  much  the  same  condition 
as  was  art  in  England  when  Whistler  arrived.  But 
you  must  understand  that  versatility,  though  praised 
of  ladies  and  seemingly  amazing,  is  not  of  prime  im 
portance.  Burns  was  a  plough-boy  who  tried  in  vain 
to  read  Shakespeare,  a  farm-hand  for  whom  the  cul 
ture  of  France  was  the  culture  of  vineyards,  a  peasant 
piping  a  simple  melody  upon  a  oaten  reed.  Lord 
Leighton  was  an  orator,  a  musician,  a  linguist — and 
a  failure,  for  he  failed  in  that  which  he  undertook — 
he  could  not  paint ;  and  so  no  longer  interests  us — for 
who  to-day  cares  to  hear  of  his  oration,  his  music? 

And  so  with  Mr.  Chambers,  when  judged  as  artist 
or  authority  on  art,  he  is  amazingly  versatile  and 
writes  too. 

But  let  not  the  hasty  rush  to  false  conclusions. 
Lord  Leighton  was  a  man  of  the  world,  a  social 


ROBERT  WILLIAM  CHAMBERS        121 

triumph,  one  whose  life  was  easy — why  should  he 
paint?  It  was  necessary  that  Burns  write  beautifully, 
if  he  would  win  to  our  good  graces,  atone  for  mani 
fold  sins,  be  received  in  Edinburgh  drawing-rooms. 
It  was  not  necessary  that  Lord  Leighton  do  anything 
save  make  himself  agreeable. 

Mr.  Chambers  is  not  ambitious  to  wrest  fame  from 
the  future.  He  laughs  well,  knows  how  to  jest  at 
table,  is  a  very  agreeable  companion,  the  dinner  guest 
par  excellence,  as  witty,  as  charming,  as  piquant  as 
any  in  Paris  or  London  or  up  and  down  Fifth  Avenue. 
And  Mr.  Edward  Byerstedt  insists,  with  reason,  that 
his  early  books  are  in  careless  moments  worth  reading : 
In  the  Quarter,  The  King  in  Yellow,  The  Maker  of 
Moons,  The  Streets  of  Ascalon,  lole,  The  Gay  Rebel 
lion.  I  personally  know  of  no  better  way  to  entertain 
a  tiresome  guest  through  a  rainy  afternoon — a  guest 
who  knows  nothing  of  art  or  books  or  Petrograd — for 
Mr.  Chambers  plays  a  fair  second  to  Miinchausen ;  by 
much  travel  he  has  learned  to  exaggerate  the  things 
that  he  has  seen,  he  has  gained  a  clever  sort  of  polish. 

Mr.  Chambers  was  born  in  Brooklyn,  N.  Y.,  May 
26,  1865.  In  his  youth  he  aspired  to  be  a  painter. 
He  studied  art  in  Paris  at  Julien's  studio  from  1886  to 
1893,  first  exhibiting  at  the  Salon  in  1889.  Then  he 
returned  to  New  York  and  for  a  while  contributed 
illustrations  to  Life,  Truth,  Vogue,  etc.  In  1893  m's 
first  novel,  In  the  Quarter,  appeared.  In  the  same 
year — he  averages  about  two  novels  a  year — he  pub 
lished  the  uncanny  but  fascinating  King  in  Yellow,  a 
collection  of  stories  of  artist  life.  In  1895  ne 


122   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

lished  what  is  still  a  rollicking  book  of  verse,  With 
the  Band: 

Ses  Corporal  Madden  to  Private  McFadden: 
"Bedad  yer  a  bad  'un! 
Now  turn  out  yer  toes! 
Yer  belt  is  unhookit, 
Yer  cap  is  on  crookit, 
Ye  may  not  be  drunk, 
But,  be  jabers,  ye  look  it  I 
Wan — two ! 
Wan — two! 

[Ye  monkey- faced  divil,  I'll  jolly  ye  through! 
Wan — two ! — 
Time!     Mark! 
Ye  march  like  the  aigle  in  Cintheral  Park!" 

Then,  at  irregular  intervals  from  1894  to  1903, 
came  The  Red  Republic,  Lorraine,  Ashes  of  Empire, 
Maids  of  Paradise,  all  having  dashing  young  Ameri 
cans  as  their  heroes,  all  with  a  setting  in  France  during 
the  Franco-Prussian  War.  Then  with  Cardigan  and 
The  Maid  at  Arms,  he  turned  to  the  American  Rev 
olution. 

But  the  setting — New  York,  Palm  Beach,  the  fields 
of  France — the  time — yesterday,  to-day,  to-morrow — 
are  as  nothing  to  The  Girl  Phillipa,  Athalie,  Some 
Ladies  in  Haste,  The  Restless  Sex.  And  the  prob 
lems  of  marriage,  and  of  heredity — the  foibles,  fash 
ions,  follies,  the  extravagances  and  eccentricities  of 
the  Upper  Classes;  these  he  details  with  a  quite  un 
common  ingenuity  that  the  shop-girl  may  read,  envy 


ROBERT  WILLIAM  CHAMBERS        123 

a  little  and  turn  away — a  fox  for  cuteness — recogniz 
ing  that  the  existence  of  debutantes  is  flat  and  un 
profitable,  the  grapes  from  which  they  brew  the  wine 
of  life  as  sour  as  gall.  For  Mr.  Chambers  is  some 
thing  of  a  philosopher.  He  realizes  that  if  he  depicted 
the  Four  Hundred  as  worthy  of  all  praise,  their  doings 
making  progress  for  all  time,  he  would  not  be  believed, 
and  he  would  lose  his  readers. 

THE  WORKS  OF  ROBERT  CHAMBERS  INCLUDE  : 

In  the  Quarter,  The  King  in  Yellow,  The  Red  Re 
public,  A  King  and  a  Few  Dukes,  The  Maker  of 
Moons,  With  the  Band,  The  Mystery  of  Choice,  Lor- 
raine,  Ashes  of  Empire,  The  Haunts  of  Men,  The 
Cambric  Mask,  Outsiders,  The  Conspirators,  Cardigan, 
The  Maids  of  Paradise,  Orchard-Land,  Japonette, 
Forest  Land,  lole,  The  Fighting  Chance,  Mountain 
Land,  Tracer  of  Lost  Persons,  The  Tree  of  Heaven, 
The  Firing  Line,  Some  Ladies  in  Haste,  the  Danger 
'Mark,  The  Special  Messenger,  Hide  and  Seek  in 
Forestland,  The  Green  Mouse,  Ailsa  Page,  Streets  of 
'Ascalon,  Adventwres  of  a  Modest  Man,  Blue-bird 
Weather,  Business  of  Man,  The  Common  Law,  Gay 
Rebellion,  Who  Goes  There?,  The  Hidden  Children 
Athalie,  Police!,  The  Dark  Star,  The  Better  Man,  The 
Girl  Philippa,  Barbarian,  The  Restless  Sex,  The  Moon 
lit  Way,  In  Secret. 


CHAPTER  XX 

EDWARD   LUCAS    WHITE 

Mr.  Edward  Lucas  White  is  the  author  of  but  two 
novels,  El  Supremo,  1916,  and  The  Unwilling  Vestal, 
1918;  yet  is  he  one  of  the  foremost,  one  of  the  most 
important,  one  of  the  most  interesting  of  our  innumer 
able  novelists.  And  to  understand  him  properly.  .  .  . 

"A  literarian  can  be  understood,"  says  Mr.  White, 
"only  through  a  knowledge  of  his  origin;  of  the  cir 
cumstances,  influences  and  training  which  shaped  his 
character;  of  the  enthusiasms  which  inspire  and  the 
theories  which  control  his  writings;  and  of  his  methods 
and  aims. 

"I  am  a  genuine  American,  since,  before  the  Dec 
laration  of  Independence,  all  my  ancestors  except  one 
were  in  the  thirteen  colonies,  and  he,  Major  Florant 
Meline,  came  over  with  Lafayette,  fought  through  the 
Revolutionary  War,  married  here  and  settled  in  Al 
bany.  I  am  also  a  genuine  Marylander  and  Baltimorean. 
My  great-grandfather,  John  White  (1779-1854),  was  a 
local  merchant  of  some  prominence  and  prospered 
sufficiently  to  retire  and  live  on  his  investments.  An 
other  Baltimore  great-grandfather,  Fielding  Lucas,  Jr. 
(1781-1854),  was  in  his  time  one  of  the  most  promi 
nent  publishers  in  the  United  States.  I  was  born  in 
Bergen,  New  Jersey,  on  May  i8th,  1866,  my  father 

124 


EDWARD  LUCAS  WHITE  125 

being  in  business  in  New  York  for  some  years  before 
and  after  his  marriage.  My  earliest  recollections  are 
of  Brooklyn,  where  my  parents  lived  from  1868  to 
1872.  Later  I  spent  some  years  with  my  grandmother 
on  her  farm  on  the  eastern  shore  of  Lake  Seneca',  in 
Ovid  Township,  Seneca  County,  N.  Y.  In  1877  my 
parents  returned  to  Baltimore  and  I  have  been  ever 
since  a  Baltimorean.  I  have  spent  little  time  outside 
of  Maryland.  In  1885  I  went  by  sailing  ship  to  Rio 
de  Janeiro,  spent  the  summer  of  1889  touring  in 
Europe  and  for  the  first  half  of  1892  was  a  temporary, 
stop-gap  teacher  of  freshman  Latin  at  Dartmouth 
College. 

"In  my  teens,  besides  history,  poetry  and  fiction,  my 
favorite  reading  was  about  science:  astronomy,  geol 
ogy,  biology,  palaeontology  and  primitive  man:  Dar 
win,  Huxley  and  Kingdon  Clifford  and  such  writers. 
I  expected  to  be  a  biologist  and  public  lecturer.  At 
college  I  quickly  realized  that  my  interest  in  science 
was  all  in  its  results  and  that  I  had  no  special  faculties 
for  inference  and  almost  none  of  observation. 

"While  at  sea,  in  the  company  of  the  firmament 
and  the  ocean  and  their  surges  and  stars,  fifty-four 
days  out  to  Rio  and  thirty-five  back,  I  had  the  leisure 
to  evaluate  my  character.  I  discerned  that  I  was  most 
positively  a  poet  and  planned  my  life  accordingly.  I 
had  to  make  a  living  and  considered  my  ambitions, 
tastes  and  powers.  Longfellow  appeared  the  best 
model.  It  seemed  to  me  that,  as  long  as  I  lived,  there 
would  be  a  good  demand  for  professors  of  Romance 
Languages  in  American  Colleges  and  Universities; 
that  mastering  the  Romance  languages  would  conduce 


126   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

to  development  as  a  literarian,  and  that  teaching  them 
would  not  be  destructive  of  creative  literary  powers. 
I  continued  my  studies  with  all  that  in  view.  After 
making  myself  familiar  with  Old  High-German,  Mid 
dle  High-German,  Anglo-Saxon,  Middle  English,  Old 
French,  Old  Spanish,  Early  Italian  and  what  was  best 
in  their  literatures  and  in  the  more  modern  literatures 
of  those  tongues,  I  realized  with  a  shock  that  every 
thing  admirable  in  those  literatures  is  either  a  rem 
iniscence,  an  echo  or  an  imitation  of  something  in 
the  literatures  of  Rome  and  Greece:  that  an  aspirant 
for  success  in  creative  literary  effort  should  go  straight 
to  the  sources;  that  no  one  ever  really  comprehends 
modern  literatures  without  knowing  the  classics;  that 
no  one  can  be  a  capable  teacher  of  modern  language 
linguistics  without  the  linguistics  of  Latin  and  Greek. 
I  went  back  to  the  classical  tongues  and  literatures, 
to  put  in  a  foundation  on  which  I  could  hope  to  be  a 
really  good  professor  of  Romance  languages  and  lit 
eratures  and  might  become  a  real  poet.  Before  I  had 
completed  that  foundation,  before  the  superstructure 
was  more  than  begun,  my  health  broke  down.  I  could 
study  no  more  and  must  make  a  living  at  once.  I  was 
master  of  merely  mediocre  attainments  in  Latin  and 
Greek.  School  teaching  in  these  was  my  only  resource. 
A  teacher  of  Greek  and  Latin  in  private  schools  in  Bal 
timore  I  have  been  ever  since  1892. 

"As  with  my  education,  so  with  my  literary  output : 
the  course  of  my  life  has  been  determined  by  my  bad 
health.  Since  nine  years  of  age  I  have  been  subject 
to  sudden  and  unpredictable  sick-headaches,  which  lay 
me  up,  abed  and  fasting  in  the  dark,  for  from  one  to 


EDWARD  LUCAS  WHITE  127 

three  days  and  after  which  I  dare  not  look  at  print  or 
writing  more  than  momentarily  for  days  or  maybe 
weeks.  Even  when  at  my  best  I  must  be  wary  and 
cautious  in  the  use  of  my  eyes;  reading  or  writing  too 
continuously  or  too  long  always  brings  on  a  visitation. 
Thus  I  have  been  able  to  do  only  a  small  fraction  of 
what  I  might.  I  can  never  work  by  artificial  light, 
seldom  by  the  waning  light  of  late  afternoon,  mostly 
only  .in  the  morning. 

"My  tastes  in  literature  were  early  dominated  by 
my  passion  for  the  writings  of  Edgar  Allan  Poe.  I 
fuddled  my  brain  reading  and  rereading  him  till  I 
had  to  banish  from  my  home  everything  of  his,  if  I 
was  to -read  anything  else.  Later  Swinburne  led  me 
not  only  to  intensive  study  of  prosody,  but  to  the 
knowledge  of  some  of  the  authors  I  love  best :  Sappho, 
Catullus,  Dante,  Victor  Hugo,  Villon,  Baudelaire, 
Rossetti,  and  others. 

"Besides  my  dominating  interest  in  literature  I  have 
always  had  others.  In  Europe  I  managed  to  see  some 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  paintings  in  three  months 
and  have  ever  since  possessed  vague  approximations  to 
connoisseurship  in  paintings.  I  take  a  similar  interest 
in  sculpture  and  architecture.  I  read  much  about  in 
ternational  politics,  geography  and  the  inhabitants, 
products  and  manufactures  of  all  parts  of  the  world. 
My  chief  pleasures  are  writing  and  reading.  All  other 
occupations  are  merely  interruptions  to  or  postpone 
ments  of  these. 

"I  early  recognized  that  anything  I  wrote  in  verse 
assumed  at  once  a  final  form  and  had  a  sort  of  merit : 
the  rhythm  was  never  despicable,  nor  was  any  violence 


128   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

done  either  to  the  sense  or  the  metre  in  fitting  each  to 
the  other.  On  the  other  hand  I  might  rewrite  an 
essay  or  story  any  number  of  times  and  still  find  it 
as  contemptible  as  in  its  first  draft.  When,  after  my 
sea-voyage,  I  reconsidered  my  manuscripts,  I  judged 
all  my  prose  worthless  even  as  practice-work  and  my 
hundreds  of  attempts  at  poems  no  more  than  passable 
experiments;  I  burnt  them  all.  Thereafter  I  soon 
acquired  the  power  to  write  poems  by  no  means  be 
neath  notice  both  in  ideas  and  in  expression,  but  I 
toiled  on  doggedly  at  prose  without  ever  seeming  any 
nearer  a  prose  style.  Not  until  August  of  1903  did 
I  write  a  tale  which  my  critical  faculties  approved  as 
not  bad  enough  to  burn. 

"As  time  went  on  my  bread-winning  and  other  du 
ties  used  up  more  nearly  all  my  daily  energy  and  my 
surplus  for  creative  writing  dwindled  steadily.  I 
realized  that  I  could  seldom  attain  that  detachment, 
serenity  and  elevation  of  mood  in  which  alone  poetry 
can  be  produced.  I  was  unwilling  to  waste  time  on 
writing  such  mediocre  verse  as  might  be  written  by  a 
man  tired,  worried  and  distracted ;  I  turned  more  and 
more  to  prose,  which  can  be  turned  out  in  any  mood  in 
any  brief  interval  of  leisure.  My  one  volume  of  poems 
attracted  little  notice. 

"From  1904  on  I  had  some  meagre  success  both  at 
writing  short  stories  and  at  selling  them  to  magazines. 
By  1909  I  felt  myself  capable  of  a  romance.  My  rash 
impulse  was  to  emulate  Sienkiewicz's  The  Deluge, 
which  I  rate  as  the  greatest  historical  romance  ever 
written;  for,  when  I  became  fascinated  with  Francia, 
the  Dictator  of  Paraguay,  and  read  up  on  him,  I  real- 


EDWARD  LUCAS  WHITE  129 

ized  that  I  had  blundered  on  an  unworked  Golconda  of 
literary  material.  I  attacked  my  task  with  ardor,  elated 
at  my  great  opportunity  and  wrote  my  El  Supremo  in 
the  summers  of  1910,  1911  and  1912,  with  some  little 
work  in  the  winters  between.  I  write  my  tales  in  a 
large  free  hand  in  lead-pencil  on  small  sheets  of  paper. 
My  wife  typewrites  them  from  my  cruelly  illegible 
draft.  The  chief  event  in  my  life  has  been  a  singu 
larly  happy  marriage. 

"Having  meditated  for  years  a  picaresque  adven 
ture-romance  of  the  days  of  Commodus  I  was  satu 
rated  with  the  spiritual  and  social  atmosphere  of  that 
period,  and,  when,  after  the  completion  of  El  Supremo, 
I  considered  which  of  the  plots  in  my  note-books 
seemed  most  tempting,  I  pitched  on  that  of  The  Un 
willing  Vestal  as  being  of  that  same  period.  I  had 
long  had  an  ambition  to  write  a  romance  of  classic 
times  in  which  the  characters  would  be  depicted  as 
talking  as  the  Romans  talked,  rather  than  according 
to  the  absurd  conventions  of  English  literary  tradition 
for  classic  conversations.  The  result,  while  satisfac 
tory  to  me,  has  not  won  the  critics  or  the  public. 

"In  all  I  have  written  I  have  always  asked  myself 
how  the  poem  or  tale  would  read  a  hundred  years  from 
now.  If,  on  examination,  it  seemed  of  merely 
ephemeral  interest,  I  have  almost  always  destroyed 
what  I  had  written. 

"My  literary  creed  is  that  no  one  should  write  unless 
in  possession  of  an  idea  of  theme  or  plot  original  and 
worth  writing  about;  nor  unless  writing  lucidly  and 
agreeably/' 


130   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

MR.  WHITE'S  WORKS  INCLUDE  THE  FOLLOWING  : 

Narrative  Lyrics  (1908),  El  Supremo  (1916),  The 
Unwilling  Vestal  (1918),  The  Song  of  the  Sirens 
(short  stories,  1919). 


CHAPTER  XXI 

NEWTON  A.  FUESSLE 

To  those  who  read  The  Harbor  in  the  spring  of 
1915 — The  Harbor  with  its  quiet  strength,  the  echo 
and  the  reality  of  life — Mr.  Ernest  Poole  must  have 
seemed  a  literary  catch  of  the  finest.  To  most  of  his 
readers  he  was  .unknown,  though  he  had  been  writing 
(for  the  magazines  and  for  the  stage)  through  a  num 
ber  of  years.  But  to.  read :  "Chapter  I. — 'You  chump/ 
I  thought  contemptuously.  I  was  seven  years  old  at 
the  time,  and  the  gentleman  to  whom  I  referred  was 
Henry  Ward  Beecher  .  .  ."  must  excite  curiosity.  Or 
to  hear  him  say:  "Sue  made  me  perfectly  wretched 
.  .  ."  To  look  back  with  him  and  smile  at  his  "small 
desolate  self"  as  he  was  in  the  months  that  followed, 
after  Dillon  had  sailed  away  with  Eleanore  to  Europe. 
To  find  a  way  out  of  the  chaos  and  confusion  along 
the  Hudson,  about  the  East  River,  among  the  railroad 
lines;  to  shift  and  reload  the  endless  traffic  onto  ocean 
going  vessels ;  to  see  the  Harbor  grow  into  a.  port,  the 
boy  into  a  man — one  inclines  to  expect  a  great  deal  of 
Mr.  Ernest  Poole  in  the  years  to  come. 

For  there  is  a  fascination  in  such  novels,  the  novels 
that  discover  new  and  competent  writers.  One  feels, 
in  lesser  degree,  what  Keats  felt  when  first  he  looked 

131 


132    THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

into  Chapman's  Homer — "like  some  watcher  of  th« 
skies  when  a  new  planet  swims  into  his  ken." 

And  so  when  I  heard  of  The  Flail  (published  as  my 
book  goes  to  press),  I  prevailed  upon  one  who  writes, 
as  in  somepld  anthology,  under  that  most  authentic  of 
pseudonyms,  Anonymous,  to  tell  me  of  Mr.  Newton 
A.  Fuessle.  .  .  . 

"A  few  cogent  literary  can'ts  have  spread  Newton 
A.  Fuessle  out  into  a  dual  personality.  He  can't  write 
fiction  when  he's  hungry.  He  can't  write  fiction  when 
he's  cold.  He  can't  write  fiction  in  the  daytime.  He 
can't  write  fiction  when  he's  worried  about  bills.  He 
can't  write  fiction  unless  he  is  surrounded  by  creature 
comforts.  He  can't  write  fiction  without  good  cigars 
and  plenty  of  them. 

"He,  therefore,  spends  most  of  his  time  making  it 
possible  to  spend  part  of  his  time  in  sincere,  unham 
pered  literary  production.  His  office  is  on  Wall  Street. 
But  instead  of  finding  that  a  cold,  calculating  busi 
ness  career  is  smothering  the  artist  in  him,  it  has  on 
the  contrary  helped  cultivate  the  artist  in  him.  At 
dusk,  his  creative  faculties  swing  automatically  into 
action. 

"He  believes  that  the  present  enormous  quantity  pro 
duction  of  fiction  is  a  curse,  and  is  satisfied  if  he  can 
spend  several  hours  a  day  on  a  novel  under  working 
conditions  that  suit  him.  He  believes  that  extrava 
gant  tastes  are  inherent  in  every  imaginative  writer, 
and  that  tossing  off  rapid-fire  tales  under  high  pressure 
to  get  the  money  is  all  too  likely  to  follow  if  a  fiction 
writer's  income  depends  entirely  upon  his  royalties. 
He  has  seen  too  many  writers  of  promise  cave  in  under 


NEWTON  A.  FUESSLE  133 

the  strain  and  descend  from  their  best  to  their  worst, 
to  be  willing  to  'step  lively*  on  the  same  treadmill. 

"Mr.  Fuessle's  creed  contains  some  beguiling  and  un 
expected  ideas  on  the  responsibility  of  novelists.  He 
declares  that  the  markets  are  overwhelmed  with  jaded, 
strained,  unimportant  new  books  by  established  novel 
ists  who  dash  them  off  because  they  want  a  new  car, 
a  new  house,  or  a  new  wife.  He  hates  writing  which 
has  become  a  habit,  and  which  rushes  into  print 
whether  or  not  the  novelist  has  something  new  to  say, 
something  important  to  set  forth,  something  to  picture 
sincerely.  He  blames  modern  merchandizing  and  ad 
vertising  for  the  enormous  markets  they  have  created 
for  shallow  and  mediocre  fiction  by  flooding  the  coun 
try  with  magazines  that  have  largely  become  primarily 
portfolios  of  advertising. 

"Mr.  Fuessle's  own  apprenticeship  in  letters  was 
served  at  what  he  calls  the  altar  of  the  false  gods  of 
fast  and  furious  writing  for  the  notion-counters  of 
magazine  fiction,  where  the  whole  cry  is  for  novelty 
instead  of  truth.  He  must  have  written  and  sold 
nearly  a  million  words  of  short  stories  before  it  began 
to  dawn  upon  him  that  nearly  every  master  he  had 
studied  had  to  tear  himself  loose  from  the  short  story 
before  he  found  the  way  to  something  more  than 
fragmentary  expression  of  what  he  knew  about  life. 

(  'The  short  story  has  gained  its  popularity  in  Amer 
ica/  declares  Mr.  Fuessle,  'because  of  the  ease  with 
which  the  lazy,  the  superficial,  the  dilettante-minded 
can  dabble  with  it  and  market  their  manuscripts.  The 
short  story  is  the  china-painting  of  fiction.  Even  in 
its  more  finished  development,  it  usually  remains  the 


134   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

mere  trapeze-work,  the  acrobatics  of  fiction,  neurotic 
instead  of  natural,  smart  instead  of  true.  Even  Guy 
de  Maupassant  attained  greatness  in  but  a  few  short 
stories  in  all  his  voluminous  production  in  this  form. 
We  can  search  almost  in  vain  for  the  real  de  Mau 
passant,  the  real  Tolstoy,  the  real  Balzac  in  their  short 
stories.  One  must  go  to  their  novels  to  get  at  their 
understanding  of  life.  The  short  story  puts  the 
premium  on  the  arrangement,  the  distortion,  the  play 
ing1  with  the  facts  of  life.  The  novel,  on  the  contrary, 
puts  the  premium  where  it  belongs — upon  a  revelation 
of  the  deeper  currents  of  motive  and  experience.  By 
the  novel,  I  mean,  of  course,  the  record  of  the  evolu 
tion  of  character. 

"  'It  is  far  from  my  intention  to  condemn  the  short 
story  in  its  entirety,  or  to  argue  that  it  does  not  have 
its  legitimate  field,'  continued  the  author.  'As  an 
apprenticeship  to  more  comprehensive  endeavor  in 
writing,  as  an  interlude  between  more  sustained  efforts, 
the  short  story  has  an  important  place.  But  it  seems 
too  bad  that  so  abrupt,  breathless,  fragmentary,  and 
restricted  a  form  of  fiction  has  attained  such  over 
whelming  popularity  in  America,  and  offers  such  large 
rewards  and  the  lure  of  so  quick  a  "turn-over,"  that  its 
whole  tendency  is  to  withold  a  writer's  efforts  from  the 
longer-lived  and  more  satisfying  novel  form. 

*  'It  is  one  of  the  tragedies  of  American  literature 
that  such  writers  as  Edgar  Allan  Poe,  O.  Henry,  and 
Harris  Merton  Lyon  died  without  leaving  us  a  novel. 
One  hopes  that  gifted  contemporaries  like  Edna  Ferber 
and  Fannie  Hurst  will  not  lay  down  their  pens  before 
they  have  bequeathed  to  the  world  their  share  of 


NEWTON  A.  FUESSLE  135 

novels,  and  revealed  to  us  more  fully  than  they  can 
do  in  the  terse  confines  of  short  stories,  their  singular 
comprehension  of  life. 

"  'When  I  speak  of  the  responsibility  of  the  novelist, 
I  mean  it  in  an  artistic,  rather  than  in  a  moral  sense. 
The  reader  can  get  no  more  out  of  a  novel  than  the 
author  puts  into  it.  So  much  sham  and  pose  and  pre 
tense  have  taken  possession  of  the  people  who  write 
and  publish  books  that  one  sometimes  feels  like  run 
ning  screaming  out  of  a  bookshop. 

"  'My  conception  of  what  should  go  into  a  novel  in 
order  to  make  it  worthy  of  being  sold  and  read,  is 
stated  from  the  point  of  view  of  one  who  has  bought 
and  examined  and  thrown  away  large  quantities  of 
books  for  the  sake  of  finding  the  few  that  I  wanted  to 
keep.  I  believe  that  a  novelist  who  is  unwilling  to 
express  as  truly  as  possible  his  own  reactions  to  his 
contact  with  life,  has  no  business  wasting  your  time 
and  my  time  with  his  fiction.  Unless  he  possesses  the 
candor  and  the  willingness  to  do  that,  he  is  adding 
nothing  new  to  the  net  recorded  sum  of  human  knowl 
edge.  I  do  not  say  that  a  novelist  should  write  his 
autobiography  into  his  novel.  Lord  forbid!  But  I 
do  imply  that  unless  I  can  see  an  important  phase  of 
myself  in  each  of  the  characters  I  undertake  to  present, 
and  interpret  my  characters  in  terms  of  my  own  reac 
tions  to  life,  I  cannot  imbue  a  character  with  anything 
approaching  convincing  verisimilitude/  concluded  Mr. 
Fuessle." 

And  so  concludes  my  interviewer.  And  I  return 
to  the  slaughter,  not  exactly  as  a  lamb,  but  rather 


136   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

(despite  Mr.  Fuessle's  protested  innocence)  as  one  of 
Herod's  henchmen.  For  I  do  not  believe  it  necessary 
that  a  writer  add  "anything  new  to  the  net  recorded 
sum  of  human  knowledge";  I  doubt  very  much  if 
there  be  anything  new  to  add — certainly  you  will  not 
find  it  in  Mr.  Cabell's  Beyond  Life,  to  my  notion  the 
most  profitable  and  thought-provoking  of  recent  fic 
tions,  for  it  was  Wilde's  theory  that  nature  imitated 
art,  Wilde's  theory  taken  from  Whistler,  who  found 
its  proof  in  Japanese  experience.  Nor  am  I  convinced 
that  Shakespeare  reacted  to  life  in  terms  of  Falstafl. 
Rather  was  Falstaff  deliberate  creation,  born  in  dis 
illusion,  an  escape  from  the  cramped  reality  of  Eliza 
bethan  life — for  art  is  that  earth  recreated  nearer  the 
heart's  desire  of  which  old  Omar  dreamed.  Not  be 
cause  he  was  a  student  of  the  things  that  are  did 
Shakespeare  make  of  Malvolio  a  steward  in  the  house 
of  the  Lady  Olivia  and  set  that  house  upon  the  shores 
of  Seacoast  Bohemia.  Love,  not  reason,  is  the  sole 
motivating  force  in  art — all  great  thoughts,  as  Vis 
count  Morley  has  said,  spring  from  the  heart. 

Yet  is  all  this  little  better  than  a  quibble,  for,  in  the 
main,  I  agree  with  Mr.  Fuessle;  and  I  like  his  book 
immensely.  It  is  the  story  of  Rudolph  Dohmer, 
youngest  son  of  a  German  immigrant  father,  who, 
growing  up  in  the  eighteen-nineties,  early  feels  the 
promptings  of  a  desire  to  become  thoroughly  Ameri 
can,  who  fights  against  the  "hunnishness"  that  is  in 
him  through  the  nineteen-hundreds,  through  school, 
through  the  University  of  Chicago,  through  business 
and  marriage,  to  a  victory  in  nineteen-eighteen.  It  is 
told  with  a  wealth  of  explaining  incident,  in  beauty 


NEWTON  A.  FUESSLE  137 

and  understanding*,  with  a  vividness  that  is  rare  even 
in  the  best  of  poetry.  But  it  overstresses — written 
during  the  war — the  horror  of  being  born  German. 
There  is  surely  nothing  disgraceful  in  being  born  a 
Nietzsche,  a  Goethe,  a  Strauss,  a  Richtofen,  a  Weddi- 
gen — Lord,  that  we  had  them  by  the  million.  The 
point  at  issue  is,  in  a  phrase,  not  well  taken — for 
young  Byron  with  his  club-foot  endured  just  such  a 
youth  as  Mr.  Fuessle  describes,  and  it  is  (for  all  our 
democracy)  the  experience  of  countless  Jews.  One 
instance : — 

"  'Who  was  that  you  were  talking  to,  dear?'  asked 
the  girl's  mother. 

'  'Oh,  no  one  much,'  answered  Emily.     That  Ger 
man  boy  who  goes  to  school.' 

"The  listener  retreated  heavily  to  his  bicycle,  and 
rode  away  in  utter  anguish  into  the  melancholy  Sep 
tember  night.  .  .  .  The  phrase  'that  German  boy' 
glided  to  and  fro  like  a  shadowy  shuttle  through  the 
loom  of  his  being,  weaving  arabesques  of  despair  and 
distorting  his  self-respect  into  gloomy  self-pity.  .  .  ." 

As  when  Byron,  at  Eton,  overheard  one  whom  he 
loved  refer  to  him  as  "that  lame  kid."  There  is  in 
all  of  us  something  of  that  self-conscious  shame  which 
makes  young  Dohmer  doubt  his  worth,  an  uncouth 
viciousness  against  which  we  must  fight,  inherited 
brutalities  and  sin.  Mr.  Fuessle's  hero  might  as  well 
have  been  Irish  or  Scotch  or  Italian — and  if  it  is  true 
that  they  suffer  at  our  hands  as  he  says  young  Dohmer 
suffered,  then  the  shame  is  ours,  not  theirs.  .  .  . 

Yet  is  the  meaning  always  clear,  the  expression 
suited  to  the  mood  ...  "a  feeling  of  inferiority  had 


I38  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

run  like  a  sombre  fugue  through  all  his  school 
days.  .  .  ."  Though  the  metaphors  are  at  times  over 
emphasized:  "billows  of  heat  brooded  over  Becker 
Street  like  almost  visible  dragons  .  .  .  the  red,  surly 
sun  had  banked  his  fires  for  the  night  .  .  .  the  red 
brick  houses  glared  at  each  other  across  the  pave 
ment  .  .  .  the  sultry,  humid  afternoon  had  been  as 
moist  as  a  sponge  .  .  ."  since  a  sponge,  out  of  water, 
may  become  as  dry  as  the  deserts  of  Arabia.  For 
Mr.  Fuessle  is  fond  of  the  double  adjective:  "a  brown- 
haired,  dimpled  young  woman  .  .  .  querulous,  dys 
peptic  father  .  .  .  hot,  panting  crowds,  heavy, 
squeaking  Sabbath  shoes  .  .  .  she  had  a  ringing  laugh 
that  issued  musically  from  a  long,  contralto  throat 
through  strong,  gleaming  teeth  and  full,  crimson 
lips.  .  .  ."  But  he  knows  how  to  write.  .  .  . 

"He  turned  to  his  favorite  selection,  a  passage  from 
Scott' s  The  Lady  of  the  Lake.  Pensively  he  scanned 
the  lines.  They  were  saturated  with  color  and  pathos 
and  longing.  They  filled  him  as  music  fills  a  void  of 
the  spirit.  .  .  .  The  more  he  mused  over  the  passage, 
the  more  beauty  he  found  dwelling  in  the  lines — the 
gentle  melancholy  of  the  rhythmic  lines,  .  .  . 

"They  were  playing  a  Viennese  Waltz.  The  strains 
were  wholly  strange  to  Rudolph,  but  their  luminous 
coloring,  their  fleet  measure  and  whimsical  phrasing 
attracted  him  mightily — stole  through  his  being  like 
rich,  narcotic  vapors.  .  .  . 

"...  a  deliciously  disturbing  glimpse  of  the  dusk 
of  rose  and  twilight  of  green,  shed  from  certain  hotel 
casements.  .  .  . 

"Rudolph  adored  her.    But  his  romantic  yearnings 


NEWTON  A.  FUESSLE  139 

sought  no  more  definite  expression  than  mute  worship 
from  afar.  He  contented  himself  with  feasting  his 
sad,  hungry  eyes  upon  her  face,  with  waiting  for  the 
deluge  of  an  occasional  smile.  .  .  ." 


CHAPTER  XXII 

EMERSON  HOUGH 

"For  fifteen  years/'  says  Mr.  Hough,  "I  was  en 
gaged  in  professional  out-of-doors  journalism.  I  have 
been  a  sportsman  all  my  life,  and  my  father  before  me. 
In  this  capacity  I  have  traveled  in  almost  every  state 
in  the  union,  in  New  Brunswick,  Quebec,  British 
Columbia,  Alberta,  Manitoba,  Saskatchewan,  the 
Northwest  Territory,  Alaska,  many  parts  of  the  North 
ern  Rockies,  many  parts  of  the  Sierras  and  American 
Rockies.  I  must  confess  to  rather  a  vagabond  life. 
Sometimes  I  wonder  if  I  ever  slept  under  one  roof 
thirty  nights  consecutively.  At  least  my  frequent 
trips  into  the  open  have  done  me  a  great  deal  of  good 
physically,  and  have  afforded  me  pretty  much  all  the 
happier  moments  of  my  life — it  is  impossible  to  fret 
over  things  when  you  are  wading  a  trout  stream,  fol 
lowing  a  good  dog,  or  riding  a  good  horse. 

"I  still  have  my  old  cow  saddle,  I  suppose  a  dozen 
rifles  or  so,  half  a  dozen  shotguns,  as  many  fly  rods, 
salmon  rods,  etc.  I  do  not  know  whether  I  would 
rather  fish  for  salmon,  bass  or  trout,  but  have  pretty 
much  gone  out  of  all  bait  fishing  in  preference  for 
the  fly. 

"I  have  killed,  if  I  make  the  count  fairly,  or  helped 
to  kill,  either  fourteen  or  fifteen  bears,  nine  of  them 

140 


EMERSON  HOUGH  141 

grizzlies.  I  may  have  the  count  wrong  by  one.  I  am 
rather  fond  of  grizzly  hunting,  but  must  confess  I 
never  had  any  kind  of  an  adventure  with  a  bear.  I 
would  rather  shoot  'Bob  White'  quails  than  grizzlies 
and  believe  them  about  as  dangerous. 

"As  to  my  favorite  sports,  I  cannot  name  them. 
Sometimes  I  think  it  is  shooting  quail  over  a  good 
dog,  and  again  I  think  nothing  touches  stream  fishing 
for  trout,  where  you  wade  and  cast  a  good  fly  with  a 
good  rod.  I  put  in  time  regularly  each  Spring  and 
Fall  in  this  pastime — going  to  Michigan,  Wisconsin, 
the  Rockies  for  the  one  sport,  and  to  some  of  the 
Southern  States  for  the  other. 

"I  have  killed  examples  of  most  of  the  big  game 
in  the  country — of  every  species,  including  my  buffalo, 
which  I  killed  as  late  as  1886.  I  have  seen  some  rather 
wild  trips  in  the  wilderness,  of  course,  but  do  not 
know  whether  I  have  ever  been  much  of  a  hero,  al 
though  I  have  had  many  a  bully  time.  I  think  I  have 
between  a  dozen  and  a  dozen  and  a  half  mounted  heads 
of  big  game,  product  of  my  own  rifle — the  taxiderm 
ist  has  most  of  them  now,  for  the  Missus  kicks  on 
them  littering  the  house.  My  workroom  is  the  abhor 
rence  of  the  aforesaid  Missus,  because  mixed  up  with 
the  appliances  of  a  modern  business  office  I  have  all 
sorts  of  Indian  junk  and  curios  of  the  out-of-doors, 
literally  from  one  end  of  this  continent  to  the  other. 

"I  presume  that,  after  all,  although  I  am  better 
known  as  a  writer  of  fiction  and  magazine  articles,  my 
real  life  work  has  been  in  the  open  and  has  to  do  with 
literature  of  the  out-of-doors.  I  write  a  great  many 
things  for  the  Saturday  Evening  Post,  for  an  instance, 


142  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

but  I  believe  I  enjoy  my  little  department  there  more 
than  anything  else  I  do  for  that  great  institution. 

"My  first  book,  The  Singing  Mouse  stories,  had  to 
do  with  out-of-doors.  My  next  book — and  the  one 
which  gave  me  my  first  dim  chance  as  a  writer — was 
The  Story  of  the  Cowboy.  My  first  novel,  Girl  at  the 
Halfway  House,  dealt  somewhat  with  the  out-of-doors 
and  with  the  West.  I  have  liked  the  early  life  of 
America  as  a  field  for  study  more  than  anything  else 
I  have  ever  handled.  Often  as  a  boy  I  regretted  I  was 
not  born  in  the  time  of  Carson  and  Fremont.  I  still 
regret  that.  I  believe  I  would  have  fitted  into  the  life 
of  that  time  better  than  I  do  into  that  of  to-day." 

But  in  spite  of  Mr.  Hough's  preferences  for  his 
stones  of  life  in  the  open,  it  is  as  a  writer  of  tales  that 
most  people  know  and  admire  him.  The  Mississippi 
Bubble  and  Fifty-four  Forty  or  Fight  were  among  the 
best-sellers  of  a  decade  ago.  A  couple  of  years  ago 
his  story  of  the  Lewis  and  Clark  Expedition,  The 
Magnificent  Adventure,  was  widely  read.  The  latest 
of  his  novels,  The  Way  Out,  deals  with  the  moun 
taineers  of  Kentucky  and  their  struggle  for  education. 

Mr.  Hough  was  born  at  Newton,  Iowa,  June  28, 
1857,  the  son  of  Joseph  Rond  and  Elizabeth  Hough, 
and  was  educated  at  the  State  University  of  Iowa, 
graduating  A.B.  in  1880.  "I  started  in  life  with  a 
very  small  equipment,"  he  says  in  the  American  Maga 
zine:  "I  had  a  university  education,  perfectly  good  and 
perfectly  worthless.  In  line  with  the  traditions  of  my 
family  I  was  intended  for  the  practice  of  law,  and 
was  admitted  to  the  bar.  Perhaps  the  ambition  to 
write  was  mine  from  early  youth;  I  don't  know.  I 


EMERSON  HOUGH  143 

remember  that  in  the  course  of  my  law  studies  I  used 
to  snatch  time  to  write  'pieces/  as  we  called  them  in 
those  days.  Some  of  those  early  sketches  found  print 
in  magazines  of  the  East  before  the  time  that  I  was 
admitted  to  the  bar. 

"After  I  was  admitted  to  the  bar  my  first  location 
was  in  a  small  town  in  New  Mexico,  half  mining  camp 
and  half  cow  camp,  the  capital  of  an  inland  empire  of 
wild  life  such  as  cannot  be  found  anywhere  on  the 
surface  of  the  earth  to-day.  In  this  rugged  field, 
among  these  splendid  and  sterling  men,  in  an  atmos 
phere  not  too  law-abiding,  but  always  just  and  broad, 
I  got  my  first  actual  impression  of  life  on  my  own. 
I  learned  there  to  respect  a  man  for  what  he  really  is, 
not  for  what  he  has  or  for  what  he  pretends  to  be." 

Mr.  Hough  stresses  the  importance  of  keeping 
one's  independence  of  thought  and  action — take  less 
money,  if  necessary,  but  be  free.  And  he  would  offer 
William  Ernest  Henley's  Invictis  to  "every  young  man, 
every  beginner,  and  every  striver,  of  whatever  age"; 
he  insists  that  "it  ought  to  be  included  in  every  busi 
ness  college  course,"  that  "it  shows  the  only  road  to 
success :  and,  what  is  much  better,  it  points  out  what 
success  ought  to  be  at  the  end  of  that  road" : — 

Out  of  the  night  that  covers  me, 
Black  as  the  pit  from  Pole  to  Pole; 
I  thank  whatever  gods  may  be 
For  my  unconquerable  soul. 

It  matters  not  how  straight  the  gate, 
How  charged  with  punishment  the  scroll. 


144  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

I  am  the  master  of  my  fate; 
I  am  the  captain  of  my  soul! 

A  fine  poem  which  did  not  help  Henley  to  succeed, 
or  to  keep  friends  with  the  great  men  of  his  day. 
This  proves,  I  think,  that  you  can  make  a  legend  of 
yourself  in  letters.  I  have  a  sincere  liking  for  Henley, 
both  for  what  he  was  and  for  what  he  pretended  to 
be — yet  I  notice  that  it  is  the  pretense  which  most  im 
presses  the  ordinary — for  in  literature  the  dream  pre 
vails,  the  dream  of  what  you  might  have  been. 

The  latest  book  by  Mr.  Hough  has  been  published 
under  the  title  of  The  Web.  It  is  the  story  of  the 
American  Detective  League,  that  vast  silent  volunteer 
army  of  business  men  who  became  detectives  to  help 
win  the  war.  It  has  been  called  a  revelation  of 
patriotism. 

His  next  scheduled  book  is  The  Sagebnisher. 


CHAPTER  XXIII 

THOMAS   NELSON    PAGE 

Mr.  H.  L.  Mencken  insists  that  the  late  Confederate 
States,  for  all  their  forty  million  population  can  show 
but  one  literary  craftsman  of  the  first  rank,  Mr.  Cabell. 
This  is,  however,  not  so  strange  as  he  would  have  us 
think,  for  weighed  in  the  balance  with  all  the  literature 
of  all  the  world,  any  age  and  any  country  must  seem, 
at  the  moment  considered,  almost  entirely  void  and  de 
serted  of  beauty.  There  never  was,  there  never  will  be 
(as  Whistler,  in  his  Ten  O'clock,  told  all  those  that 
have  ears  to  hear) — there  never  was  an  artistic  age  nor 
an  artistic  people.  The  Athenians  who  came  to  finger 
and  carp  before  the  work  of  Phidias  were  no  more  in 
telligent  than  the  Greek  who  reads  Gyp  and  affects  a 
Parisian  accent.  The  Roman  who  read  Horace  was 
no  more  usual  in  the  days  of  Augustus  than  is  the  Eng 
lishman  who  quotes  him  in  the  Times,  paraphrasing 
his  quaintness  to  prove  the  paucity  of  English. 

True,  Mr.  Thomas  Nelson  Page  is  not  to  be  com 
pared  to  Boccaccio.  For  all  of  Santa  Claus's  Partner 
and  John  Marvel,  Assistant,  we  might  never  know  that 
over  three  hundred  years  ago  Marlowe  set  us  free 
"from  jigging  veins  of  rhyming  mother-wits,  and  such 
conceits  as  clownage  keeps  in  pay" — might  never  know 
that  men  have  looked  out  from  prison  windows  to 


146  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

glimpse  the  stars.  Mr.  Thomas  Nelson  Page  is  no 
Ibsen,  is  not  to  be  mentioned  in  the  same  breath  with 
Synge  or  Schnitzler  or  de  Maupassant  .  .  .  neither  is 
he  to  be  ignored.  In  Ole  Virginia  deserves  better  of 
your  critic  than  does  much  that  is  religiously  treasured 
as  a  heritage  from  the  Holy  Roman  Empire.  And  it 
is  not  possible,  yet  a  while,  to  dismiss  Meh  Lady  to  a 
curt  oblivion.  Marse  Chan.  .  .  . 

Marse  Chan,  the  first  of  Mr.  Page's  stories,  was 
published  in  1884.  Of  its  writing  he  tells  us:  "A 
friend  showed  me  a  letter  which  had  been  written  by 
a  young  girl  to  her  sweetheart  in  a  Georgia  regiment, 
telling  him  that  she  had  discovered  that  she  loved  him, 
after  all,  and  that  if  he  would  get  a  furlough  and  come 
home  she  would  marry  him;  that  she  had  loved  him 
ever  since  they  had  gone  to  school  together  in  the 
little  schoolhouse  in  the  woods,  Then,  as  if  she  feared 
such  a  temptation  might  be  too  strong  for  him,  she 
added  a  postscript  in  these  words :  'Don't  come  with 
out  a  furlough;  for  if  you  don't  come  honorably  I 
won't  marry  you.'  This  letter  had  been  taken  from 
the  pocket  of  a  private  dead  on  the  battlefield  of  one 
of  the  battles  around  Richmond,  and,  as  the  date  was 
only  a  week  before  the  battle  occurred,  its  pathos  struck 
me  very  much.  I  remember  I  said,  The  poor  fellow 
got  his  furlough  through  a  bullet.'  The  idea  remained 
with  me,  and  I  went  to  my  office  one  morning  to  write 
Marse  Chan,  which  was  finished  in  about  a  week." 

It  won  immediate  recognition  and  praise.  It  is 
unduly  sentimental,  perhaps,  but  the  South  was  then, 
as  always,  fired  with  feelings  of  home  and  family  that 
seem  to  the  less  close-knit  North  a  little  far-fetched. 


THOMAS  NELSON  PAGE  147 

Mr.  Page  is  a  Virginian;  he  idealizes,  no  doubt,  but 
it  is  of  a  Virginia  that  he  knows  to  have  existed  that 
he  tells,  Virginia  before  the  war  and  during  the  re 
construction  period. 

Mr.  Page — appointed  American  Ambassador  to 
Italy,  June  21,  1913 — is  a  Virginian,  born  on  the  old 
plantation  of  Oakland  in  Hanover  County,  April  23, 
1853.  He  descends  from  two  governors  of  the  state, 
one,  Thomas  Nelson,  a  signer  of  the  Declaration  of 
Independence.  He  was,  report  says,  a  rather  pre 
cocious  boy,  entering  Washington  and  Lee  University 
when  only  sixteen  years  of  age,  remaining  there  three 
years,  and  then — after  spending  a  few  months  in  Ken 
tucky — transferring  to  the  law  department  of  the  Uni 
versity  of  Virginia.  He  finished  in  about  half  the 
time  usually  required,  and  took  up  the  practice  of  law 
in  Richmond,  1875-93.  For  long  he  was  faithful  to 
his  profession,  but  what  is  the  law  when  set  beside 
the  creation  of  Uncle  Billy? 


CHAPTER  XXIV 

ROBERT   HERRICK 

"I  am  afraid  I  have  been  very  little  tolerant  of  the 
merely  entertainment  aspect  of  fiction,"  says  Mr. 
Robert  Herrick.  "The  magazine  story  and  the  boy- 
and-girl  novel  have  no  significance  to  me  whatever. 
Little  more  has  the  adventure  tale  of  cowboys  and 
Alaska.  All  that  seems  to  me  meretricious  and  ephem 
eral.  Since  Howells'  strong  earlier  work,  I  consider 
that  there  has  been  little  American  fiction  of  good 
quality, — Frank  Norris,  London,  some  of  Phillips' 
books,  two  or  three  volumes  of  Mrs.  Wharton,  are 
among  these.  I  feel  that  American  novelists  are  afraid 
of  being  dull,  and  have  the  irritating  American  defect 
of  not  taking  themselves  seriously  enough." 

The  criticism  is  just,  though  somewhat  over- 
emphatic.  Dreiser  and  Hergesheimer  and  Cabell  (to 
name  but  three)  are  serious,  detailing  their  situations 
with  all  that  is  relevant,  never  (so  far  as  I  know) 
smart  or  false  to  their  standards  for  the  sake  of  effect. 
And  the  boy-and-girl  novel  depends,  for  its  value  as 
literature,  not  upon  the  plot  or  the  age  of  the  boy 
and  girl,  but  upon  its  telling — whether  it  be  Romeo 
and  Juliet  or  a  magazine  story.  American  fiction  suf 
fers  not  so  much  because  it  is  a  tale  of  adventure, 
merely  entertaining,  as  from  the  narrow  view  of  life 

148 


ROBERT  HERRICK  149 

taken  by  our  novelists — a  world  from  which  Falstaff 
and  Omar  and  Rabelais  are  banished — a  world  in 
which  Eve  is  rather  the  mother  of  sin  than  (in  a  truer 
sense  than  ever  the  Virgin  was)  the  mother  of  Man. 

But  I  grow  serious  myself,  and  your  critic  must 
laugh  and  make  a  mock  of  art  as  it  is  practiced  in  the 
suburbs  lest,  seeing  the  True  Romance  in  filthy  rags, 
torn  by  the  touch  of  prentice  hands,  he  mistake  her  for 
an  impostor  and,  unwitting,  revile  her  openly  in  the 
marketplace. 

Mr.  Herrick  was  born  in  Cambridge,  Massachusetts, 
April  28,  1868,  and  educated  at  the  Cambridge  Latin 
School  and  at  Harvard,  where  he  graduated  with  the 
class  of  1890.  His  father,  Dartmouth,  '35,  a  lawyer 
practising  in  Boston,  was  the  author  of  several  legal 
books,  notably  The  Town  Officer,  which  is,  so  I  am 
told,  still  in  use.  With  him  the  academic  tradition 
begins.  All  the  earlier  Herricks,  in  this  country,  were 
farmers.  The  original  ancestor,  a  nephew  of  the 
poet's — the  name  Robert  appears  in  every  generation — 
settled  in  Salem  in  1638.  "My  father's  branch  of  the 
family,'*  says  Mr.  Herrick,  "moved,  in  two  hundred 
years,  about  thirteen  miles,  to  Boxford,  Mass,  (near 
Andover),  where  my  uncle  still  cultivated  the  ancestral 
farm  quite  profitably,  ran  a  saw-mill  and  a  cider-mill, 
as  well  as  a  herd  of  cattle,  all  of  which  were  familiar 
memories  of  my  youth,  for  we  spent  about  five  months 
of  the  year  in  an  old  French-and-Indian-War  house 
with  a  double  cellar,  about  a  mile  from  the  Herrick 
place.  Until  I  went  to  college,  Boxford  had  more 
significance  to  me  than  Cambridge.  My  mother's 
family  came  from  Boxford.  Her  father  (an  Emery) 


ISO  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

was,  for  fifty  years,  pastor  of  the  First  Congregational 
church  at  Weymouth,  near  Boston.  (The  immediate 
families  related  to  us — Hale,  Welsh,  Manning  and 
Peabody — were  preserved  in  the  middle  names  of  my 
brothers  and  sisters;  I  doubt  if  a  single  one  of  my 
ancestors  came  to  this  country  later  than  the  middle 
of  the  seventeenth  century;  this  shows  the  thorough 
New  Englandism  of  my  descent — and,  by  the  way, 
the  Manning,  my  grandmother's  family,  was  related 
to  Hawthorne.)  My  grandfather  Emery  was  said 
to  have  been  something  of  a  revivalist  in  his  early 
years ;  also  to  have  loved  a  good  horse ;  and,  for  a  fact, 
he  raised  a  family  of  three  children,  sent  them  all  to 
good  schools,  and  saved  quite  a  small  competency,  all 
on  a  salary  that  was  not  over  one  thousand  dollars  a 
year.  He  was  a  charming  old  gentleman — and  very 
much  the  gentleman,  as  I  have  heard  Mrs.  William 
James,  who,  in  her  youth,  was  one  of  his  parishioners, 
often  declare. 

"My  course  of  study  at  college  was  largely  literary. 
At  that  time  the  English  department,  under  Child, 
Adams  Sherman  Hill  and  Barrett  Wendell,  was  espe 
cially  strong.  Hill  and  Wendell  had  created  the  new 
method  of  teaching  composition.  I  had  always  wished 
to  write,  and  it  was  but  natural  that  I  should  gravitate 
toward  courses  in  English  composition;  also  into  the 
editorship  of  the  Harvard  Advocate;  and,  later,  of  the 
Harvard  Monthly.  There  was,  at  that  time,  a  brilliant 
set  of  young  men  of  literary  tastes,  among  whom  were 
George  Santayana  and  Norman  Hapgood;  also  the 
poet  Moody  and  Mr.  R.  M.  Lovett,  now  editing  The 
Dial  in  New  York.  All  these  men  and  many  others, 


ROBERT  HERRICK  151 

were  editors  of  the  Harvard  Monthly,  which  had  been 
founded  in  1886  under  the  influence  of  Mr.  Wendell — 
and  it  did  more  for  me  than  anything  else  Harvard 
offered  me,  both  the  exercise  of  writing  for  it  and  the 
association  with  the  other  editors. 

"The  year  '87,  however,  I  spent,  not  at  college,  but 
in  travel.  A  friend  and  classmate  who  had  broken 
down  in  health,  asked  me  to  become  his  traveling  com 
panion,  and,  together,  we  made  a  long  journey  from 
New  York  to  the  Bahamas,  Cuba,  Mexico,  California, 
Alaska,  returning  by  the  Yellowstone  Park  to  Colorado 
and  the  East.  For  a  boy  of  eighteen,  who  had  never 
been  out  of  the  state  of  Massachusetts  except  for  a 
brief  visit  to  Broadway,  once,  such  a  journey  covering 
nine  months  was  a  revelation  of  romantic  scenery, 
strange  peoples,  as  well  as  the  vast  extent  of  our  own 
nation.  I  remember  with  special  vividness  the  weeks 
spent  in  Mexico,  also  the  month  spent  in  the  Yosemite 
Valley,  which  was  then  a  wild  and  remote  paradise. 
On  the  way  to  Alaska  we  were  joined  by  my  friend's 
father,  together  with  President  Gilman  of  Johns  Hop 
kins,  and  Professor  Louis  Dyer  of  Oxford.  There 
were  also  on  the  boat  Mr.  Butler,  then  an  instructor 
at  Columbia,  and  various  notables  of  the  United  States 
Senate,  who  amused  themselves  with  poker  in  an  inside 
cabin  while  we  journeyed  through  the  marvelous 
glacier  scenery  of  the  far  north.  That  year  of  travel 
was  undoubtedly  worth  a  great  deal  more  to  me  than 
several  years  of  college.  At  any  rate,  it  awakened  my 
appetite  for  travel,  of  which  I  have  done  a  good  deal 
in  later  years. 

"As  the  spring  of  1890  drew  close,  it  became  im- 


152   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

perative  that  I  should  find  some  job.  I  had  written 
a  good  many  stories  for  the  college  magazines — I 
had,  as  editor-in-chief,  nearly  wrecked  the  Harvard 
Monthly  financially  by  publishing  the  first  English 
translation  of  Ibsen's  Lady  from  the  Sea.  But  my 
ideals  in  literature  had  been  formed  largely  on  the 
contemporary  French  school,  which  would  not  assist 
me  in  placing  my  fiction  with  the  American  magazine 
of  that  time.  One  of  my  college  friends,  Professor 
George  Carpenter,  was  undertaking  to  organize  an 
English  department  in  the  Massachusets  Institute  of 
Technology  and  asked  me  to  join  him.  I  taught  there 
for  three  years  under  Professor  Carpenter,  and  learned 
my  profession  from  him.  When  he  was  called  to 
Columbia,  in  1893,  I  accepted  a  call  to  the  new  Uni 
versity  of  Chicago,  to  organize  the  teaching  of  rhetoric 
and  English  composition  on  the  Harvard  method.  I 
can  very  well  remember  the  forbidding  aspect  of 
the  unfinished  buildings,  the  muddy  and  unfinished 
campus  and  the  variegated  stretch  of  the  Midway,  on 
which  the  University  fronted,  which  was  then  in  full 
blast  during  the  closing  weeks  of  the  great  World's 
Fair.  To  plunge  from  orderly  Boston  and  more 
orderly  Cambridge  into  the  unfinished  bustle  of  Chi 
cago  and  the  World's  Fair  was  a  large  experience  for 
a  young  man  of  twenty-six. 

"I  have  retained  my  connection  with  the  University 
of  Chicago  ever  since  1893,  although,  of  late  years,  I 
have  not  been  in  residence  except  for  three  or  six 
months  of  the  year,  and  have  been  relieved  of  depart 
mental  and  faculty  routine.  I  may  say,  here,  that  I 
have  not  found  any  inherent  antagonism  between  teach- 


ROBERT  HERRICK  153 

ing  and  writing,  both  of  which  I  have  practiced  con 
stantly;  and  I  have  never,  in  the  twenty-five  years  of 
my  connection  with  the  University,  felt  in  the  slightest 
degree  hampered  in  anything  I  have  written  or  said. 
I  had  begun  to  publish  stories  before  I  left  Boston, 
the  first  one  in  Scribner's  Magazine,  to  be  followed 
shortly  by  several  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly;  and,  in 
1896,  while  I  was  in  Europe  on  a  year's  absence,  began 
my  first  novel.  From  that  time,  my  books  came  on 
about  every  other  year  for  the  next  fifteen  years  or 
so.  While  I  was  writing  novels,  I  also  edited  manu 
scripts,  collaborated  in  a  textbook  for  secondary 
schools,  which  has  had  a  long  and  lucrative  career; 
wrote  stories  and  articles  for  the  magazines ;  in  short, 
did  all  the  many  necessary  journeyman  jobs.  But  the 
main  thing  was  the  novel !  I  wrote  my  novels,  usually, 
in  the  long  vacations  which  I  took  from  University 
work  somewhere  in  the  East,  in  the  New  England 
country.  Together  was  written  partly  during  the  year 
spent  in  Cornish,  N.  H.,  partly  in  a  cold  winter  at 
Bethel,  Me.  Other  books  written  in  the  solitude  and 
beauty  of  that  little  Maine  town,  near  the  White  Moun 
tains,  were  The  Healer,  and  The  Master  of  the  Inn. 
"Of  late  years,  I  have  lived,  during  half  the  year, 
on  the  Maine  seacoast,  near  Portsmouth,  in  York 
Village,  where  I  have  a  small  house  and  a  few  acres. 
There  I  have  written  His  Great  Adventure,  Clark's 
Field,  The  Conscript  Mother,  and  The  World  Decision. 
I  lead  a  very  simple  life,  writing  three  or  four  hours 
in  the  morning  and  spending  the  rest  of  the  day  in 
my  garden  or  walking  in  the  country.  I  find  that  city 
life  fatigues  me  and  distracts  my  attention  from  my 


154   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

work.    My  stories  come  to  me  in  solitude  and  in  the 
country. 

"To  return,  for  a  last  few  words,  to  my  contribu 
tion  to  the  American  novel:  you  will  find  my  critical 
opinions  on  the  subject  in  a  two-part  article  published 
in  the  Yale  Review  during  1915.  I  think  the  one 
subject,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  always  to  be 
found  in  my  books  is  the  competitive  system — its  in 
fluences  upon  men  and  women.  Whenever  I  look  back 
into  these  books,  I  find  the  one  insistent  question 
implied  in  almost  every  chapter,  What  is  success?' 
Various  forms  of  success  and  the  interpretation  of 
success  are  there  portrayed.  Of  course,  the  novels 
differ  widely  in  point  of  view,  and  in  background. 
Many  of  the  early  ones  were  concerned  with  business 
because,  although  I  have  never  had  direct  business 
experience,  I  have  lived  many  years  of  my  life  in  a 
great  business  center,  where  commercial  life  was  the 
one  dominant  interest  and  commercial  standards  were 
the  standards  of  the  community.  Looking  at  the 
books  from  another  angle,  you  will  find  they  fall  into 
two  classes, — those  strictly  of  realistic  technique,  such 
as  The  Memoirs  of  an  American  Citizen  and  The  Com 
mon  Lot;  and  those  of  a  freer,  more  poetic  technique, 
such  as  The  Real  World,  A  Life  for  a  Life,  and 
Clark's  Field.  I  need  scarcely  say  that  these  latter  are 
the  books  nearer  my  heart,  but  they  are  not  the  ones 
which  appeal  most  widely  to  the  public." 


CHAPTER  XXV 

HAROLD  MACGRATH 

Questioned  by  the  late  Joyce  Kilmer  as  to  what  is 
the  matter  with  contemporary  fiction,  Mr.  Harry  Leon 
Wilson  answered,  "Cherchez  la  femme!" 

Or  blame  the  women!  The  charge  is  as  old  as 
Adam. 

"I  know  little  about  literature/'  Mr.  Wilson  is  re 
ported  as  saying,  "but  if  you  mean  the  novel,  I  should 
say  that  the  influence  most  harmful  to  its  development 
is  the  intense  satisfaction  with  it  as  it  is,  of  the  maker, 
the  seller,  and  the  buyer.  And  to  trace  this  baneful 
satisfaction  to  its  source,  I  should  say  it  lies  in  the 
lack  of  a  cultivated  taste  in  our  women  readers  of 
fiction." 

How  about  a  lack  of  taste  in  the  men  readers?  The 
answer  is,  according  to  Mr.  Wilson,  simple :  "Pub 
lishers  are  agreed  that  women  buy  the  great  bulk  of 
their  output."  The  inference  being  that  men,  as  a 
lot,  do  not  read  at  all — save  the  newspapers;  they 
have  no  influence  of  any  kind,  good,  bad  or  indifferent 
.  .  .  except,  perhaps,  as  authors.  And  then? 

"The  current  novel  is  as  deliberately  planned  to 
please  the  woman  buyer  as  is  any  other  bit  of  trade 
goods.  The  publisher  knows  what  she  wants  to  read, 
the  writer  finds  out  from  the  publisher,  and  you  can 

153 


156   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

see  the  result  in  the  advertisements — and  the  writer's 
royalty  statements." 

The  writer  and  the  publisher,  then,  sell  out  to  the 
woman-buyer?  Certainly.  "A  publisher  with  ideals 
of  his  own  couldn't  last/*  says  Mr.  Wilson,  "any 
longer  than  a  grocer  with  ideals  of  his  own,  or  a 
clergyman." 

The  publisher  is  in  business  to  make  a  living — but 
why  blame  the  women  ?  Surely  they  are  charitable  in 
keeping  him  alive — without  ideals  of  his  own  .  .  . 
and  with  such  writers.  Because  the  market  calls  for 
bacon  hogs,  and  I  raise  bacon  hogs,  must  I  go  round 
saying  that  I  would  raise  lard  hogs  if  the  buyers  would 
only  let  me — a  man  can  die  rather  than  steal  or  gain 
money  in  ways  that  fail  to  suit  his  honor.  But  your 
publisher  is  very  well  satisfied.  "Oh,  take  the  Cash," 
he  says  with  Omar,  "and  let  the  Credit  go." 

And  would  any  man  write  an  impossibly  awful, 
sugar-coated  novel  if  he  were  capable  of  writing 
Richard  Fevcrel?  The  proof  is  that  Meredith  wrote 
no  such  books  as  are  usual  in  America — such  books 
as  make  even  the  authors  bow  their  heads  in  shame. 

But  all  this  does  not  explain  away  Mrs.  Wharton, 
George  Eliot,  Miss  Jessie  Rittenhouse,  Mrs.  Atherton, 
Madame  Sand,  nor  the  thousands  upon  thousands  of 
women  that  are  as  cultivated  as  any  novelist  (or  critic, 
for  that  matter)  that  ever  lived — nor  does  it  begin 
to  explain  the  fine  taste  of  Miss  Edith  Wyatt — the  wit 
of  Miss  Clare  Kumner. 

The  truth  seems  to  be  that  women  read  though 
their  taste  be  as  uncultivated  as  a  hedgerow,  whereas 
uncultivated  men  are  merely  oafs.  So,  it  is  for  the 


HAROLD  MACGRATH  157 

uncultivated  women  in  their  hundreds  of  thousands 
that  publishers  publish  rather  than  for  the  cultivated 
few,  either  men  or  women,  who  joy  in  literature? 
Not  at  all.  Such  good  books  as  come  along  are  always 
published.  The  root-trouble  is:  they  are  rather  hard 
to  write. 

But  matters  might  be  worse.  I  rode  up  beside  a 
factory  girl  in  the  street-car  yesterday  and  she  was 
reading  The  Gadfly,  a  corking  yarn,  written  by  a 
woman. 

However,  I  was  intending  to  speak  of  Mr.  Harold 
MacGrath  who  writes,  I  judge,  primarily  for  the 
market,  to  please  the  ladies.  •  And  surely  for  all  our 
fine  talk  of  art  and  capital  a's,  this  is  no  mean  ambi 
tion.  For  what  is  art?  'Tis  not  hereafter;  present 
mirth,  etc. 

Mr.  Harold  MacGrath  was  born  at  Syracuse,  New 
York,  on  September  4,  1871.  He  was  educated  there; 
he  still  lives  there;  and  there  in  1890  he  took  up  with 
journalism.  In  1899  he  published  his  first  book,  Arms 
and  the  Woman— the  title  has  since  been  used  by 
others;  it  is  apparently  a  good  title.  But  in  1901,  he 
moved  into  that  "imaginary  Central  Europe  which  lies 
somewhere  east  of  Dresden,  west  of  Warsaw,  and 
north  of  the  Balkans"  (where  he  had  visited  with  the 
woman),  to  write  The  Puppet  Crown,  The  Grey  Cloak 
and  The  Princess  Elopes,  returning  to  this  country  for 
a  triumph  with  The  Man  on  the  Box.  As  a  boy, 
though  doubtless  most  humbly  in  the  minority,  I  read 
and  enjoyed  all  five  of  these  early  books  of  Mr.  Mac- 
Grath's — but  I  have  completely  forgotten  them,  prob 
ably  outgrown  them,  and  so  no  damage  done  to  Mr. 


158   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

Wilson's  theory.  Nor  need  I  feel  ashamed,  for  "those 
tales  were"  (Mr.  Maurice  has  since  said)  "in  the  first 
rank  among  the  thousands  of  stories  that  about  that 
time  were  being  written  about  the  fanciful  kingdoms 
and  principalities,  and  the  natural  gift  for  story- 
spinning  that  the  author  showed  then  has  been  in  evi 
dence  in  his  subsequent  tales  in  other  fields:  perhaps 
those  most  conspicuous  on  the  score  of  popularity 
have  been  Half  a  Rogue,  The  Goose  Girl,  The  Carpet 
of  Bagdad,  and  The  Voice  in  the  Fog." 


CHAPTER  XXVI 

PETER    CLARK    MACFARLANE 

It  is  the  habit  of  novelists  to  make  mock  of  review 
ers,  to  insist  that  they  have  no  sense  of  discrimination, 
that  their  influence  upon  literature  is  rather  evil  than 
good.  So  I  have  been  reading  the  reviews  of  Mr.  Peter 
Clark  Macfarlane's  latest  volume,  The  Crack  in  the 
Bell — described  on  the  wrapper  as  "a  story  of  love  and 
politics  in  a  great  American  city,  dealing  impartially 
with  the  socially  elect  and  the  submerged  tenth." 

But  the  reviews  are  instructive.  .  .  .  The  Crack  in 
the  Bell. 

"A  crack  on  the  head,"  says  the  New  York  World, 
"from  a  policeman's  club  first  puts  young  Jeremiah 
Thomas  Archer  to  sleep,  and  then  awakens  him  to  the 
need  of  a  thorough  overhauling  of  Philadelphia  as  to 
its  civic  establishment."  Amusing,  and  to  the  point. 

"Politics  has  been  pretty  rotten  in  California,"  says 
the  Sacramento  News,  "but  never  quite  as  bad  as  it 
is  in  Philadelphia,  if  we  take  the  picture  that  Peter 
Clark  Macfarlane  gives  us  in  his  latest  book."  Mr. 
Macfarlane  lived  in  California  for  a  number  of  years; 
doubtless  he  too  thought  politics  "pretty  rotten"  out 
there — but  why  despair?  he  said  to  his  neighbors;  they 
are  even  worse  in  Philadelphia,  and  they  survive.  So 

159 


160   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

he  brought  some  cheer  and  hope  into  the  dismal  offices 
of  the  Sacramento  News. 

"Philadelphia  is  the  scene  of  the  story,"  says  Miss 
Dorothy  Scarborough.  "The  plot  is  rather  compli 
cated.  A  couple  of  love  affairs  are  mixed  up  with 
politics,  and  events  move  with  rather  more  swiftness 
than  credibility.  All  sorts  of  men  and  women  figure, 
from  policemen  to  the  aristocratic  boss  of  the  city, 
from  Jewish  sidewalk  merchants  to  young  girls  in 
society.  The  humble  characters  are  realistic  and  con 
vincing,  but  the  cultured  ones  are  mechanical  and 
unlifelike.  Mr.  Macfarlane  has  made  special  investi 
gations  of  political  conditions  for  his  magazine  articles 
and  his  work  in  that  line  is  sincere  and  frank.  In  this 
novel  he  tells  much  of  political  methods  that  voters 
would  do  well  to  think  about/' 

I  repeat,  the  reviews  are  instructive;  and  any  one 
who  can't  form  a  fair  estimate  of  the  book  from  them, 
had  better  read  it  to  judge  for  himself — 'twill  be  no 
waste  of  anybody's  time. 

For  my  part,  I  am  inclined  to  agree  with  the  New 
York  Evening  Post:  "We  wish  to  be  generous;  there 
are,  no  doubt,  many  persons  of  discriminating  taste 
who,  impressed  by  the  realistic  settings,  will  be  thrilled 
by  the  large  dose  of  romance,"  etc. 

Mr.  Macfarlane  was  born  in  St.  Clair  County,  Mis 
souri,  March  8,  1871,  the  son  of  James  Clark  and 
Mary  Elizabeth  (Sperry)  Macfarlane.  He  attended 
the  Florida  Agricultural  College,  at  Lake  City,  from 
1885-7.  He  married,  for  the  first  time,  in  1891,  again 
in  1909.  From  1892  to  1900  he  was  in  Los  Angeles 
with  the  general  freight  department  of  the  Atchison, 


PETER  CLARK  MACFARLANE         161 

Topeka  and  Santa  Fe  Railroad.  Then  for  a  year  he 
was  on  the  stage  with  various  stock  companies,  touring 
the  Pacific  Coast.  In  1902  he  was  made  pastor  of 
the  First  Church  (Disciples  of  Christ),  Alameda,  Cal. 
And  in  1909,  he  became  general  secretary  of  the  Men's 
Brotherhood  of  Disciples  of  Christ,  with  headquarters 
in  Kansas  City,  Missouri,  travelling  an  average  of 
50,000  miles  a  year.  Since  1909  he  has  devoted  his 
entire  time  to  literary  work  and  to  lecturing,  con 
tributing  short  stories,  serials,  magazine  articles  to 
McClure's,  American,  Collier's,  the  Saturday  Evening 
Post.  He  now  lives  in  New  York  City;  though,  for 
some  months  past,  he  has  been  overseas. 

"When  I  am  forty,"  he  is  reported  as  saying,  early 
in  his  twenties,  "I  shall  begin  to  write  fiction,  and  I 
shall  write  a  novel."  Held  to  Answer,  a  best-seller, 
was  that  novel — The  Crack  in  the  Bell  postdating  it 
by  two  years. 

MR.  -  MACFARLANE'S  WORKS  INCLUDE  : 

The  Quest  of  the  Yellow  Pearl  (1908),  The  Cen 
turion's  Story  (1910),  Those  Who  Have  Come  Back 
(1914),  Held  to  Answer  (1916),  The  Crack  in  the 
Bell  (1918). 


CHAPTER  XXVII 

HARRY  LEON  WILSON 

Though  (as  I  have  probably  pointed  out)  very  far 
from  being  the  most  thoughtful  of  critics,  Mr.  Harry 
Leon  Wilson — praised  as  a  satirist  by  Mr.  Howells — 
editor  of  Puck  from  1896-1902,  author  of  The  Spend 
ers  and  The  Seeker,  is  not  at  all  Chapter  XXVII  when 
considered  as  a  humorist,  when  overheard  Somewhere 
in  Red  Gap  in  conversation  with  Mrs.  Lysander  John 
Pettengill,  mistress  of  the  Arrowhead  Ranch — or  when 
competing  with  Puck  as  a  mischief-maker,  calling 
Demetrius  in  the  voice  of  Lysander,  distilling  the 
juice  of  unearthly  poppies  into  the  eyes  of  sleepless 
lovers,  making  of  Bunker  Bean  such  a  May-night 
monster  for  Titania  as  has  not  appeared  among  mor 
tals  since  Bottom  roared,  calling  the  hosts  of  fairy  to 
wait  upon  his  whim — or  when  "moving  a  continent 
to  laughter"  (as  he  is  said  to  have  done)  "by  the 
dexterity  with  which  he  confronts  the  very  British 
Ruggles  with  the  complicated  problems  of  social  life 
in  the  neighborly  town  of  Red  Gap,"  somewhere  in 
the  West — or  when,  as  in  a  recent  letter,  writing  of 
his  son  and  heir,  who  is  "still  considerable  under  the 
kindergarten  age": — 

"We  at  first  fondly  believed  him  to  be  a  healthy, 
normal  infant.  Imagine,  then,  our  horrid  shock  at 

162 


HARRY  LEON  WILSON  163 

discovering  him  to  be  embellished  with  eye-lashes  and 
dimples — eye-lashes  that  long  (or  maybe  one  em-dash 
longer)  and  one  brazenly-yawning  cavity  of  a  dimple 
smack  in  the  middle  of  each  cheek!  I  am  not  com 
monly  a  pessimist,  but  I  am  unable  to  contemplate  his 
future  with  any  proper  hope.  It  almost  seems  that 
before  he  is  twenty  he  will  have  to  be  taken  out  behind 
the  barn  and  shot.  Lacking  this  or  some  equally 
drastic  measure  of  alleviation,  I  figure  in  the  prime  of 
young  manhood — one  of  those  flabby  youths  with  a 
premature  paunch — even  now  a  dreadful  threat  of 
this! — sloppy  in  dress  (egg  on  his  shirt  front!),  by 
some  inexplicable  fatality  always  needing  a  shave, 
twisting  a  long  silken  mustache,  terrifically  working 
eyebrows  and  dimples,  a  mandolin  player  of  moderate 
skill — singing  mushy  ballads  of  his  day  in  a  throaty 
tenor,  to  the  life-servitude  of  some  impressionable  girl 
with  a  knack  for  laundry  work." 

The  humor,  true,  depends  upon  your  knowing  that 
all  boys  of  twenty-one,  with  premature  eyebrows  and 
dimpled  cheeks,  are  the  college  youth  to  whom  the 
Cornell  Widow  (long  ago  when  I  was  in  my  nonage) 
applied  the  Tennysonian  saw — "in  the  spring  a  young 
man's  fancy" — adding  approvingly,  "You  bet  he  is," 
and  not  upon  the  age-old  follies  of  adolescence;  it  is 
a  humor  of  phrase  and  perversion,  other  than  that 
humor  of  Mr.  White's: — 

"Do  you  want  work?"  asks  Daly,  in  The  Biased 
Trail,  of  a  big,  awkward  lumberman. 

"Yes,  sir,"  was  the  uncomfortable  reply. 

"What  do  you  do?" 

"I'm  a  cant-hook  man.         ." 


164   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

"All  right ;  we  need  cant-hook  men.  Report  at  camp 
seven.  .  .  ."  And  Daly  looks  at  the  man  to  dismiss 
him  with  an  air  of  finality — but  the  lumberjack  lin 
gers  uneasily  in  the  doorway,  twisting  his  cap  in  his 
hands.  .  .  . 

"Anything  more  you  want?" 

"Yes,  sir.  If  I  come  down  here  and  tell  you  I  want 
three  days  off  and  fifty  dollars  to  bury  my  mother,  I 
wish  you'd  tell  me  to  go  to  hell!  I  buried  her  three 
times  last  winter.  .  .  ." 

A  quotation  (from  the  early  Mr.  White)  not,  per 
haps,  as  sophisticated  in  its  wit  as  is  the  quotation 
from  Mr.  Wilson,  but  one  more  universal  in  its  truth — 
the  truth  of  King  David :  all  men  are  liars.  Mr.  Wil 
son's  funmaking  is  more  purely  local  in  its  application, 
a  joking  that  has  to  be  translated  to  be  comprehended 
abroad,  the  fun  of  exaggeration  that  lends  point  to 
Punch's  .  .  . 

"Isaac  Denbigh,  of  Chicago,  is,  we  are  told,  one 
hundred  and  thirteen  years  of  age.  He  must  try 
again.  We  expect  better  things  than  this  of  America." 
Mr.  Wilson's  is  a  ridicule  of  taking  one's  self  too 
seriously — of  taking,  as  one  naturally  might,  one's 
child  without  a  chaser,  straight. 

But  Mr.  Wilson  cannot  be  judged  by  a  single  quota 
tion — nor,  possibly,  by  a  thousand — not  merely  be 
cause,  as  is  true,  his  invention  runs  ahead  of  his  per 
formance,  but  because  that  invention  is  of  the  best,  is 
well-nigh  the  best  of  to-day.  .  .  . 

Bunker  Bean,  in  an  eighteen-dollar-suit  of  clothes, 
secretly  in  his  heart  despises  the  detachable  cuffs  of 
his  millionaire  employer,  admires  (as  one  knowing) 


HARRY  LEON  WILSON  165 

the  elegance  of  Bulger,  an  "advanced  dresser" — 
Bunker  Bean  is  timid,  sombre  of  wear,  futile  for  all 
his  hidden  knowingness,  until  he  learns,  through  a 
clairvoyant,  that,  in  a  previous  incarnation,  he,  the 
bashful,  the  restrained,  had  walked  the  earth  the  great 
Napoleon.  His  life  immediately  changes;  the  spirit 
of  the  Corsican  descends  upon  him ;  and  .  .  .  there  is 
much  human  nature  in  such  conceptions  ...  the  fool 
ing  is  admirable  .  .  .  and  the  wording  .  .  . 

"We  traversed  a  field,"  says  Mr.  Wilson,  Some 
where  in  Red  Gap,  "where  hundreds  of  white-faced 
Herefords  were  putting  on  flesh  to  their  own  ruin," 
passing  out  through  a  gate  "that  could  be  handled 
ideally  only  by  a  retired  weight  lifter  in  barbed-wire- 
proof  armour,"  a  gate  facetiously  named  the  "Arm 
strong,"  a  gate  such  as  Mrs.  Pettengill  affected  to  the 
inconvenience  of  the  strangers  within.  ...  "I  rapidly 
calculated,"  continued  Mr.  Wilson,  "with  the  seeming 
high  regard  for  accuracy  that  marks  all  efficiency  ex 
perts,  that  these  wretched  devices  cost  her  twenty-eight 
cents  and  a  half  each  per  diem.  Estimating  the  total 
of  them  on  the  ranch  at  one  hundred,  this  meant  to 
her  a  loss  of  twenty-eight  dollars  and  a  half  per  diem. 
I  used  per  diem  twice  to  impress  the  woman" — he  was 
riding  the  ranch  with  the  owner,  a  widow,  the  Mrs. 
Pettengill  whom  I  have  mentioned.  "I  added  that 
it  was  pretty  slipshod  business  for  a  going  concern, 
supposing — sarcastically  now — that  the  Arrowhead 
was  a  going  concern.  Of  course,  if  it  were  merely  a 
toy  for  the  idle  rich.  .  .  . 

"In  the  shadowed  coolness,  aching  gratefully 
in  many  joints,  I  had  plunged  into  the  hammock's 


166   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

Lethe,  swooning  shamelessly  to  a  benign  oblivion. 
Dreamless  it  must  long  have  been,  for  the  shadows 
of  the  ranch  house,  stable,  hay  barn,  corral,  and  bunk 
house  were  long  to  the  east  when  next  I  observed 
them.  But  I  fought  to  this  wake  fulness  through  one 
of  those  dreams  of  a  monstrous  futility  that  some 
how  madden  us  from  sleep.  Through  a  fearsome 
gorge  a  stream  wound  and  in  it  I  hunted  one  certain 
giant  trout.  Savagely  it  took  the  fly,  but  always  the 
line  broke  when  I  struck;  rather,  it  dissolved,  there 
would  be  no  resistance.  And  the  giant  fish  mocked  me 
each  time,  jeered  and  flouted  me,  came  brazenly  to  the 
surface  and  derided  me  with  antics  weirdly  human. 
Then,  as  I  persisted,  it  surprisingly  became  a  musical 
trout.  It  whistled,  it  played  the  guitar,  it  sang.  How 
pathetic  our  mildly  amazed  acceptance  of  these 
miracles  in  dreams !  I  was  only  the  more  determined 
to  snare  a  fish  that  could  whistle  and  sing  simulta 
neously,  and  accompany  itself  on  a  stringed  instru 
ment,  and  was  six  feet  in  length.  It  was  that  by  now 
and  ever  growing.  It  seemed  only  an  attractive  nov 
elty  and  I  still  believed  a  brown  hackle  would  suffice. 
But  then  I  became  aware  that  this  trout,  to  its  stringed 
accompaniment,  ever  whistled  and  sang  one  song  with 
a  desperate  intentness.  That  song  was  The  Rosary. 
The  fish  had  presumed  too  far.  This,'  I  shrewdly 
told  myself,  'is  almost  certainly  a  dream/  The  sound 
less  words  were  magic.  Gorge  and  stream  vanished, 
the  versatile  fish  faded  to  blue  sky  showing  through 
the  green  needles  of  a  jack  pine.  It  was  a  sane  world 
again  and  still  (I  thought)  with  the  shadows  of  ranch 
house,  stable,  hay  barn,  corral,  and  bunk  house  going 


HARRY  LEON  WILSON  167 

long  to  the  east.  I  stretched  in  the  hammock.  I 
tingled  with  a  lazy  well-being.  The  world  was  still, 
but  was  it — quite  ?"  .  .  .  And  full  awake  he  hears,  etc. 

Mr.  Wilson  has  to  his  credit  the  following  novels: 
Zig  Zag  Tales  (1896),  The  Spenders  (1902),  The 
Lions  of  the  Lord  (1903),  The  Seeker  (1904),  The 
Boss  of  Little  Arcady  ( 1905 ) ,  Eweing's  Lady  ( 1907) , 
The  Man  From  Home  (with  Booth  Tarkington) 
(1908),  Bunker  Bean  (1912),  Ruggles  of  Red  Gap 
(1915),  Somewhere  in  Red  Gap  (1916),  Ma  Petten- 
gill  (1919). 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 

OWEN   WISTER 

Mr.  Wister  is,  as  a  rule,  ignored  by  younger  critics, 
and  yet  he  ranks  among  the  first  several  of  our 
novelists.  He  has  written  much,  in  a  somewhat  af 
fected  style,  that  is  fluently  American — U.  S.  Grant,  a 
Biography,  The  Seven  Ages  of  Washington,  Lady 
Baltimore — and  his  humor,  as  in  Philosophy  4,  is 
often  spontaneous  and  delightful. 

Yet  I,  too,  find  it  anything  but  easy  to  sympathize 
with  him,  though  he  is,  I  grant  you,  well-intentioned 
— but  hell  is  paved  with  good  intentions,  not  with  bad 
ones.  He  would  better  the  world  by  living  in  it, 
make  life  beautiful,  taking  his  cue  from  Ruskin;  but, 
as  Mr.  Shaw  has  said,  "it  was  easy  for  Ruskin  to  lay 
down  the  rule  of  dying  rather  than  doing  unjustly — 
death  is  a  plain  thing,  justice  a  very  obscure  thing." 
Mr.  Wister's  philosophy  is  that  "try  and  be  better" 
which  signifies  nothing.  He  is  rather  obvious,  beg 
ging  all  disputed  points,  than  convincing  when  he 
would  be  plausible.  Read  the  preface  to  Members  of 
the  Family.  There  is  in  it  nothing  that  a  schoolboy 
might  not  have  thought — praise  of  John  Singer  Sar 
gent  bracketed  with  a  plea  that  we  name  streets  after 
Frederick  Remington  (a  la  the  Quai  Voltaire!)  and  so 
perpetuate  the  name  of  one  whose  fame  should  live 

168 


OWEN  WISTER  169 

in  his  work,  one  who  did  as  much  as  any  other  to  dis 
cover  the  golden  beauty  of  desert  sands;  follows  a 
word  concerning  style ;  a  curse  upon  that  "herd  of  mis- 
managers  at  Washington  that  seems  each  year  to  grow 
more  inefficient  and  contemptible";  and  through  it  all 
runs,  as  leitmotif,  a  longing  for  the  return  of  dead 
days. 

Or  take  The  Seven  Ages  of  Washington.  On  page 
3  he  tells  us  that  Washington,  in  one  of  his  letters, 
wrote :  "Our  rascally  privateersmen  go  on  at  the  old 
rate;"  and  that  the  word  "rascally"  was  taken  out  as 
indecorous  in  the  first  printing  of  those  letters.  And 
again:  "Such  a  dearth  of  spirit  pray  God  I  may 
never  witness  again,"  becomes  "Such  a  dearth  of 
spirit  pray  God's  mercy  I  may  never  witness  again." 
"One  hundred  thousand  dollars  will  be  but  a  flea- 
bite,"  is  changed  to  "one  hundred  thousand  dollars  will 
be  totally  inadequate."  With  a  fine  show  of  impa 
tience  Mr.  Wister  cries  out  against  such  editing.  It 
makes  of  Washington  a  "frozen  image,  rigid  with  con 
gealed  virtue,  ungenial,  unreal."  We  must,  he  says, 
have  the  whole  truth  or  nothing.  Then  he  gives  us 
...  the  better  part  of  valor.  "Rascally,"  "fleabite," 
"pray  God,"  we  can  away  with;  but  "in  certain  of 
his  letters"  to  his  mother,  "always  beginning  'Honored 
Madam'  according  to  the  custom  of  their  time,  the 
language  contains  (and  not  wholly  conceals)  the  strug 
gle  between  the  man's  displeasure  and  the  son's  natural 
respect  and  affection" — in  later  days,  his  mother's  con 
duct  regarding  money  often  caused  Washington  pain 
and  mortification.  Some  of  the  paragraphs  in  those 
letters  "make  distressing  reading";  and  so  "we  turn 


170   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

away,  leaving  them  unquoted."  In  a  word,  Mn 
Wister's  courage  is  not  equal  to  his  creed — but  a  man 
must  be  ready  to  die  for  his  faith  if  he  would  attain 
to  greatness. 

And  so  with  The  Virginian.  Though  I  rode  for 
several  years  in  Montana  and  Oregon,  it  fails  to  move 
me — personally  I  much  prefer  Mr.  Stewart  Edward 
White's  Arizona  Nights  or  The  Desire  of  the  Moth 
by  Mr.  Eugene  Manlove  Rhodes.  Mr.  Wister's  char 
acters  live  too  much  on  the  surface ;  they  register  their 
emotions  with  the  studied  grace  of  movie  men;  there 
is  in  the  heart  of  his  tales  no  secret  a  spent  runner 
can  not  read — but  who  knows  the  answer  to  the  riddle 
of  life?  Not  Mr.  Wister  surely. 

So  too  with  his  indictment  of  Germany  in  The  Pen 
tecost  of  Calamity.  Germany  was  the  best  regulated, 
the  most  orderly,  the  most  obedient  nation  in  Europe 
— but  this  in  itself  was  no  crime.  At  the  word  of 
command  she  was  ready,  efficient,  prepared — and,  on 
the  instant,  betrayed  .  .  .  rather,  I  believe,  sinned 
against  than  sinning.  It  is  all  very  easy  to  assail  mili 
tarism  as  a  menace  to  the  peace  of  the  world;  yet 
eternal  vigilance,  not  contented  trust  in  destiny,  is  the 
price  of  liberty.  Gerry  went  out  to  fight  for  his 
Fatherland  or,  at  worst,  for  his  life.  "I  enlisted  in 
Glasgow  to  fight  for  my  King  and  Country,"  said  a 
convalescent  Scotty  to  my  friend  the  Skipper,  "but 
when  I  got  to  France  I  found  I  was  fighting  for  my 
bloody  life."  Some  such  rude  awakening,  for  all  the 
fine  phrases  on  which  he  had  been  reared,  must  have 
come  to  Gerry  too;  and  he  has  proved  himself  (ask 
those  who  faced  him)  a  brave  man.  It  is  not  neces- 


OWEN  WISTER  171 

— indeed,  I  doubt  if  it  be  possible — to  forgive  his 
rulers;  but  to  refer  to  him  as  a  beaten  coward.  .  .  . 

Yet  I  must  not  quarrel  further  with  Mr.  Wister. 
He  belongs  to  a  past  tradition,  the  ineffectual  Puritan 
school  that  looks  up  to  Mr.  Howells  as  the  critic  par 
excellence,  that,  now  and  again,  puts  a  stick  between 
the  spokes  of  that  stage,  the  modern  world,  on  which 
we  ride  toward — well,  away  from  New  England.  Mr. 
Wister  was  born  in  Philadelphia,  July  14,  1860.  "The 
first  ten  years  of  my  life/'  he  says,  "were  spent  in  that 
part  of  the  city  known  as  Germantown.  The  Civil 
War  furnished  the  first  .picture  in  my  memory.  Va 
rious  of  my  relations  would  appear  in  uniform.  The 
Great  Sanitary  Fair  makes  another  picture  in  which  the 
most  vivid  detail  is  a  model  of  the  ship  that  went  to 
the  Arctic  with  Dr.  Kane.  In  connection  with  the 
war,  too,  I  remember  very  distinctly  going  to  rooms, 
where  my  mother  worked  with  other  ladies  over  what 
must  have  been  bandages  or  clothing.  At  any  rate, 
men  in  uniform  fill  these  extremely  early  days,  and 
made  an  impression  which  lasts.  In  the  same  way, 
I  recall  the  morning  when  the  news  of  the  assassina 
tion  of  Lincoln  arrived.  I  was  not  quite  five  years 
old,  but  I  remember  sitting  at  table  and  knowing  that 
something  terrible  had  happened  because  of  the  grief 
of  my  parents. 

"I  had  a  pony  very  soon  in  life,  and  learned  to  ride 
bareback  on  him.  Riding  has  been  my  favorite  exer 
cise  always.  I  went  to  various  schools,  and  was  a' 
somewhat  troublesome  boy,  I  believe.  I  never  played 
games  very  well.  The  game,  that  is  now  called 
hockey,  and  was  then  called  shinney,  was  my  favorite, 


172    THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

and  the  only  one  in  which  I  could  hold  my  own.  I 
also  learned  to  skate,  and  was  very  fond  of  this.  I 
acquired  the  power  and  the  desire  to  read  to  myself 
before  I  was  six.  The  first  book  I  remember  so  read 
ing  was  Grimm's  Household  Tales.  Soon  after  this, 
I  remember  Alice  in  Wonderland,  but  by  the  time  this 
came  out  I  could  read  fluently. 

"From  ten  to  thirteen  I  was  in  Europe,  first,  in 
school  in  Switzerland,  where  I  had  a  very  bad  time, 
and  then  in  a  school  in  England,  where  I  had  a  very 
good  time.  The  third  year  of  this  journey  I  traveled 
with  my  parents,  and  passed  the  winter  in  Rome.  At 
the  school  in  Switzerland,  I  began  to  learn  music,  which 
has  been  my  favorite  interest  ever  since,  far  surpass 
ing  that  of  literature.  There  is  no  book  in  the  world, 
with  the  exception  of  certain  works  by  Shakespeare 
and  Scott,  of  which  I  am  so  fond  as  I  am  of  quite  a 
good  many  pieces  of  music.  In  Switzerland  I  did 
some  mountain  climbing,  and  in  England  I  played 
cricket,  but  never  well.  The  school  was  at  Kenilworth, 
and  my  memories  of  the  castle  are  very  vivid.  I  had 
relations  in  the  neighborhood  and  saw  a  good  deal, 
as  a  small  boy,  of  the  very  best  kind  of  English  people. 

"In  1873  I  went  to  St.  Paul's  School,  Concord, 
N.  H.,  and  was  there  for  five  years.  I  then  went  to 
Harvard  College.  Through  these  years  my  chief  inter 
est  was  the  study  of  music  and  my  chief  pleasure  in 
out-of-doors  exercise,  horse  riding,  but  the  winter 
sports  at  St.  Paul's  School  I  enjoyed  extremely.  I 
also  rowed  on  a  crew  and  played  cricket  on  a  team  at 
St.  Paul's  School,  but  never  did  either  of  these  things 
well.  About  this  time  I  began  to  be  interested  in  the 


OWEN  WISTER  173 

West,  and  was  very  proud  of  owning  moccasins  and 
going  about  the  woods  in  them.  I  had  a  gun  and 
learned  how  to  shoot  it.  I  never  shot  particularly  well 
with  a  shotgun  and  could  always  do  better  with  a  rifle. 

"During  these  years  I  had  very  excellent  training 
in  English.  I  have  seen  no  training  since  that  equaled 
it,  or  came  near  equaling  it.  The  teaching  of  English 
to-day  is  distinctly  inferior  to  the  manner  in  which  I 
was  taught.  The  classics  also  were  made  very  in 
teresting  to  me,  both  Greek  and  Latin,  and  these  also 
I  was  well  taught,  especially  at  St.  Paul's  School.  I 
do  not  think  the  teaching  at  Harvard  College  equaled 
that  I  had  at  St.  Paul's  School,  either  in  English  or  in 
the  classics.  My  reading  was  quite  desultory,  and  I 
never  cared  for  it  so  much  as  I  did  for  music.  Grad 
uating  in  1882,  with  highest  honors  in  music  and  the 
summa  cum  laude  degree,  I  went  to  Europe,  where  I 
passed  a  year  and  a  half.  I  was  advised  by  Franz 
Liszt  to  become  a  composer,  and  I  studied  under 
Guiraud  in  Paris.  Circumstances  made  this  impos 
sible,  and  I  came  .home  and  had  a  position  as  clerk 
in  a  bank.  At  this  time  my  health  broke  down  and  I 
spent  my  first  summer,  namely  1885,  in  Wyoming. 

"I  entered  the  Harvard  Law  School  in  1885,  grad 
uating  there  in  1888.  During  this  time  I  had  been  to 
Wyoming  twice  again,  camping,  fishing,  and  hunting 
big  game,  as  well  as  to  other  parts  of  the  West,  and 
this  had  Secome  my  chief  interest.  During  these  and 
following  years  I  spent  much  time  at  Western  mili 
tary  posts.  In  1889  I  entered  the  Bar  at  Philadel 
phia  and  practiced  for  a  short  time,  but  soon  took  to 
writing  stories.  How  I  came  to  do  this,  I  have  told  in 


174   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

the  preface  to  one  of  my  books,  viz.,  Members  of  the 
Family.  I  devoted  my  attention  more  and  more  to 
writing  stories  and  gradually  ceased  to  be  anything  but 
an  official  lawyer,  having  no  practice  and  wishing  none. 

"My  first  books  were  jocose  affairs — a  three-act 
comic  opera  for  the  Harvard  Hasty  Pudding  Club,  en 
titled  Dido  and  ^neas;  a  parody  of  the  Swiss  Family 
Robinson;  a  burlesque  romance,  entitled  The  Dragon 
ofWantley  (1892)." 

In  the  preface  to  Members  of  the  Family,  he  tells 
how  "writing  had  been  a  constant  pastime  since  the 
school  paper;  in  1884  Mr.  Howells  (how  kind  he 
was!)  had  felt"  his  "literary  pulse  and  pronounced  it 
promising;  a  quickening  came  from  the  pages  of  Ste 
venson  ;  a  far  stronger  shove  next  from  the  genius  of 
Plain  Tales  from  the  Hills;  during  an  unusually  long 
and  broad  wandering  through  the  Platte  Valley,  Pow 
der  River,  Buffalo,  Cheyenne,  Fort  Washakie,  Jack 
son's  Hole,  and  the  Park,  the  final  push  happened  to  be 
given  by  Prosper  Merimee ;"  he  had  with  him  the  vol 
ume  containing  Carmen,  his  favorite  among  all  short 
stories.  So  was  inspired  a  traveler's  tale,  to  be  writ 
ten  down  after  getting  home — he  "left  some  good 
company  at  a  club  dinner  table  one  night  to  go  off  to  a 
lonely  library  and  begin  it" — and  to  be  sent  off  with  a 
second,  to  Franklin  Square,  and  so  accepted  by  Mr. 
Alden  for  Harper's. 

In  1896  Mr.  Henry  James  sat  with  him  and  went 
over  his  first  book,  patiently  and  carefully. 

Mr.  Wister  has  written  for  The  Saturday  Evening 
Post,  and,  concerning  Musk-ox,  Bison,  etc.,  for  Whit 
ney's  American  Sportsman's  Library. 


CHAPTER  XXIX 

HENRY  SYDNOR   HARRISON 

In  The  Advance  of  the  English  Novel,  Professor 
William  Lyon  Phelps  hails  Henry  Sydnor  Harrison, 
author  of  Queed,  as  "more  than  a  clever  novelist  .  .  . 
a  valuable  ally  of  the  angels."  Let  me  quote  from  a 
letter  written  by  Mr.  Harrison  some  time  in  March, 
1915,  at  Dunkirk  in  France:  "I  expect  to  have  my 
own  ambulance  to  run  after  a  while/'  (Running 
after  one's  own  ambulance  is  not  exactly  what  I  should 
expect,  but  then  I  am  not  a  clever  novelist).  "We 
make  our  headquarters  in  the  railroad  station,  and  have 
a  shed  as  big  as  a  hall  bedroom  to  sit  in  when  not 
transporting  malades  and  blesses.  I  am  sitting  there 
now  on  a  hard  bench  with  no  back  at  a  table  of  dirty 
bare  boards,  with  people  swarming  all  over  me  and 
much  noise.  ...  I  have  heard  the  guns  rumbling, 
too.  ...  I  forgot  to  say  that  I  wear  a  khaki  uniform 
and  would  be  mistaken  (at  a  long  distance)  for  a  sol 
dier."  Sitting  on  a  hard  bench  .  .  .  hearing  afar  off 
the  guns  that  call,  imperious  and  proud,  that  summon 
the  brave  to  a  hasty  espousal  with  death  .  .  .  child 
ishly  pleased  when  mistaken,  now  and  again,  from  a 
great  distance,  for  a  soldier  .  .  .  this  man,  had  he 
been  other  than  he  is,  might  have  seemed  "an  ally  of 
the  angels"  to  men  better  able  to  judge  of  such  com- 

175 


i;6    THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

parisons  than  ever  Professor  Phelps  was  .  .  .  with  a 
flaming  ardor  that  knew  no  self,  a  passion  of  service 
wasting  no  strength  in  hatred  of  the  foe,  he  might 
have  made  of  that  uniform,  so  like  a  soldier's,  a  sym 
bol  seen  beyond  the  bounds  of  nationality  and  creed. 

But  I  shall  not  attempt  to  criticize  Mr.  Harrison  or 
his  work  lest  I  run  amuck  and  be  shot  down  like  a 
mad  dog.  Queed  is  the  only  one  of  his  books  that  I 
have  ever  read  (it  has  sold  upwards  of  a  him.vred  and 
fifty  thousand  copies — "one  of  the  finest  achievements 
in  the  whole  history  of  first  novels,"  his  publishers  de 
clare) — and  (if  I  remember  rightly)  it  amused  me  no 
end  at  the  time.  ...  I  was  twenty,  twenty-one,  and 
laying  bitulithic  pavement  at  Corvallis,  in  Oregon. 
Queed  is  a  solitary,  somewhat  pedantic  young  man  who 
drifts  mysteriously  into  a  Southern  city,  settle:  down 
in  a  boarding-house,  and  applies  himself  to  C'ie  com 
position  of  a  learned  tome  on  "evolutionary  sociology" ; 
I  was  your  average  young  American,  seeking  h.  s  for 
tune  from  the  bottom  up,  in  love  with  every  other  girl 
in  Portland — we  met  .  .  .  and  part  to  go  our  differ 
ent  ways  ...  no  more. 

Shortly  after  Mr.  Harrison's  birth  at  Sewanee,  Ten 
nessee,  February  12,  1880,  his  father  resigned  the  pro 
fessorship  in  Latin  and  Greek  at  the  University  of  the 
South,  and  moved  to  Brooklyn,  New  York,  where  he 
founded  the  Brooklyn  Latin  School.  There  Mr.  Har 
rison  grew  up,  a  student  at  his  father's  school,  and 
later  an  A.B.  at  Columbia.  For  three  years  he  helped 
his  father  as  a  teacher.  Then  his  father  died  and  the 
family  moved  to  Richmond. 

"As  a  kind  of  natural  recoil  from  the  cloisterliness 


HENRY  SYDNOR  HARRISON  177 

of  the  schoolmaster's  life,"  says  Mr.  Harrison,  "I  had 
an  earnest  ambition  to  whirl  in  the  business  world, 
and  the  result  of  this  desire  was  a  partnership  with  a 
man  to  manufacture  bamboo  furniture.  The  enter 
prise  lasted  about  a  year,  cost  me  a  pretty  penny  and 
cured  me  of  addiction  to  commerce.  .  .  .  About  the 
time  I  was  winding  up  the  bamboo  works,  my  friend, 
Mr.  John  Stewart  Bryan,  whose  family  owns  the 
Richmond  Times-Dispatch,  invited  me  to  join  the 
Times-Dispatch  staff  as  a  book-reviewer.  I  accepted. 
...  I  was  soon  set  to  paragraphing ;  next  to  rhyming ; 
before  a  great  while  to  writing  editorials;  and  as  the 
years  ran  on,  I  turned  over  the  reviewing  to  another 
hand,  and  gave  all  my  time  to  the  editorial  page. 
Finally,  in  November,  1908,  circumstances  made  a 
reorganization  of  the  staff  necessary,  and  I  was  ap 
pointed  chief  editorial  writer.  The  post  was  in  every 
way  a  desirable  one;  but  newspaper  work  was  never 
my  goal;  my  whole  heart  was  never  in  it;  I  always 
wanted  to  write  books ;  and  when  I  had  put  by  enough 
to  stand  off  the  wolf  for  a  few  months,  I  burned  my 
bridges  by  resigning  my  position  and  claiming  all  my 
time  for  my  own  work.  I  could  give  myself  a  year's 
chance,  and  I  thought  that  if  I  ever  could  do  anything, 
I  could  do  it  in  a  year.  ...  In  the  meantime,  my 
brother  had  removed  to  Charleston,  West  Virginia,  to 
practice  law,  my  mother  and  sister  had  followed  him, 
and,  finding  myself  no  longer  bound  to  any  particular 
chair,  I  joined  them  within  a  few  days  after  my  resig 
nation  went  into  effect.  .  .  . 

"The   point  of   origin   of  my  desire  to  write  is 
shrouded  in  obscurity,  but  I  think  it  must  date  back 


178   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

to  an  early  period.  When  I  was  nineteen,  I  sold  a 
short  story  to  the  New  York  Sunday  Herald — I  got 
$11  for  it,  I  think — and  that  was  the  first  money  I 
ever  got  out  of  fiction.  By  the  way  that  was  hardly 
fiction,  after  all,  for  though  I  gave  it  a  fictional  form, 
the  incident  I  recounted  had  really  happened  to  an 
acquaintance  of  mine.  A  year  or  two  later  I  had  two 
little  stones  in  the  'Editor's  Drawer  Department'  of 
Harper's.  In  the  years  that  have  since  elapsed  I 
have  published  a  number  of  short  stories — perhaps  ten 
or  twelve  in  all — scattered  around  in  various  maga 


zines." 


He  received  the  M.A.  degree  from  Columbia  in 
1913,  is  unmarried,  a  Democrat,  an  Episcopalian, 
Member  of  the  National  Institute  of  Arts  and  Letters, 
author  of  Captivating  Mary  Carstairs,  Queed,  V.  V!s 
Eyes  and  Angela's  Business.  Concerning  Angela's 
Business,  Marshall  Field  &  Co.,  of  Chicago,  stated  that 
it  was  the  best  selling  novel  in  their  book  section 
during  the  Spring  of  1915;  "its  appeal  to  women  is 
reflected  in  its  demand,  which  comes  almost  wholly 
from  the  gentler  sex."  Perhaps  this  atones  for  my 
indifference. 


CHAPTER  XXX 

JOSEPH    CROSBY   LINCOLN 

"Cape  Cod?"  said  Mr.  Lincoln.  "Well,  I  ought  to 
know  the  folk  of  Cape  Cod.  I  was  born  there, — at 
Brewster,  Mass.,  February  13,  1870 — lived  there  all 
my  youth,  and  since  leaving  I  can't  remember  ever 
having  missed  visiting  the  Cape  during  the  year. 
Sometimes  I've  only  gone  there  for  a  few  days,  often 
for  months;  but  I  always  go  back;  I  suppose  it's  the 
call  of  my  blood. 

"My  father  was  a  sea  captain,  so  was  his  father, 
and  his  father  before  him,  and  all  my  uncles.  My 
mother's  people  all  followed  the  sea.  I  suppose  that 
if  I  had  been  born  a  few  years  earlier,  I  would  have 
had  my  own  ship.  But  when  it  came  time  for  me  to 
earn  a  living,  the  steamship  was  driving  the  old  square 
rigger  out  of  existence,  and  the  glorious  merchant 
marine  that  we  had  built  up  in  the  first  part  of  the 
nineteenth  century  was  fading  into  tradition. 

"So  when  my  mother  and  I  were  left  alone  in  the 
world,  since  I  was  to  be  a  business  man,  it  was  de 
cided  that  I  had  better  not  waste  time  going  to  college. 
We  went  to  live  in  Brooklyn  and  I  entered  a  broker's 
office.  It  was  not  work  to  my  liking,  however,  for  I 
wanted  to  draw,  and  eventually,  under  the  guidance 
of  Henry  Sandham,  whose  familiar  signature  was 

179 


i8o   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

'Hy,f  I  went  to  Boston.  There  I  took  an  office  with 
another  fellow  and  we  started  to  do  commercial  work. 
We  were  not  overwhelmingly  successful,  and  often,  to 
make  the  picture  sell  better,  I  wrote  a  verse  or  joke. 
Sometimes  the  verse  or  joke  sold  without  the  drawing. 
Shortly  after  this,  Sterling  Elliott,  who  was  editor 
of  the  League  of  American  Wheelmen  Bulletin,  sent 
for  me  and  offered  me  a  position  as  staff  illustrator. 
I  accepted.  That  was  in  the  days  when  every  one 
rode  a  bicycle,  and  the  journal  had  a  circulation  of 
over  a  hundred  and  twenty-five  thousand,  so  my  verses 
and  illustrations  became  known  to  a  fairly  large  public. 

"In  the  meantime  I  was  back  in  Brooklyn,  mar 
ried  to  a  Massachusetts  girl,  and  doing  considerable 
verse  for  various  publications.  They  were  mostly 
poems  in  dialect  (that  is,  in  the  vernacular  of  the 
Cape),  and  I  had  almost  unconsciously  turned  to  the 
Cape  for  my  inspiration.  I  sensed  the  fact  that  there 
is  a  subtle  humor  in  the  men  and  women  of  my  own 
stock.  Then,  too,  they  were  unusual  characters,  and 
the  homes  that  made  a  background  to  their  lives  were 
picturesque  to  a  superlative  degree. 

"It  was  about  this  time  that  I  wrote  my  first  short 
story.  I  went  again  to  the  Cape  for  my  inspiration, 
drawing  the  type  of  man  I  know  best  for  my  central 
character,  and  the  story  sold  to  the  Saturday  Evening 
Post. 

"And  I  have  been  writing  fiction  ever  since.  In 
1904  my  first  novel,  Cap'n  Erl,  was  published.  Other 
novels  have  followed  with  fairly  annual  regularity. 
They  have  all  centered  about  Cape  Cod  and  its  people, 
for  having  thoroughly  mastered  the  psychology  of  a 


JOSEPH  CROSBY  LINCOLN  181 

type  of  American  that  was  known,  appreciated,  though 
through  an  economic  law,  fast  becoming  extinct,  it 
seems  best  to  keep  on  picturing  these  people.  I  have, 
of  course,  taken  them  away  from  the  Cape,  setting 
their  individuality  in  various  phases  of  life. 

"The  type  of  sea  captain  who  figures  in  my  stories 
has  not  necessarily  an  accurately  corresponding  type 
in  my  acquaintance.  Going  back  to  the  Cape  after 
having  lived  in  New  York  and  Boston,  I  was  able  to 
get  varying  angles  on  the  lives  of  the  men  and  women 
I  had  known  in  my  childhood.  The  old  sea  captains 
that  I  remembered  best  as  a  child  were  of  more  than 
one  character,  classified  according  to  their  work.  One 
was  the  dignified  old  man  who  had  traveled  to  some 
far-away  corner  of  the  earth  and  returned  prosperous, 
to  spend  the  rest  of  his  days  as  an  autocrat  among 
his  own  people.  He  had  met  strange  peoples,  he  had 
been  trusted  with  a  ship,  and,  as  in  the  days  I  write 
of  there  were  no  instantaneous  means  of  talking  across 
the  oceans,  he  was  shrewd  at  bargaining,  and,  being 
one  of  the  owners  of  the  ship,  lost  no  chance  to  bring 
home  a  cargo  that  would  bring  rich  returns.  In  other 
words,  he  was  a  shrewd  trader  as  well  as  a  sailing 
master.  The  same  dignified  bearing  that  he  used  in 
his  trade  followed  him  on  land,  and,  though  jovial 
in  manner,  he  was  developed  in  dignity  and  character. 

"The  other  type  of  captain  was  more  popular  with 
the  youngsters.  He  may  have  been  as  shrewd,  and 
possibly  made  as  much  money,  but  he  was  filled  with 
a  greater  sense  of  humor,  and  took  life  as  a  pastime. 
Men  of  this  description  would  gather  round  the  stove 


182    THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

and  tell  wonderful  stories,  though  all  sea  captains  talk 
shop  when  they  get  together. 

"Then  too  there  was  what  are  termed  the  'longshore 
captains/  These  were  mostly  engaged  in  fishing,  or 
in  trading  with  coast  towns  and  cities.  They  were 
necessarily  more  limited  in  their  views,  for  they  spent 
more  time  ashore,  often  working  a  good-sized  garden, 
fishing  when  the  spirit  moved,  and  running  a  schooner 
to  New  York  or  Boston  if  the  chance  came.  .  .  . 

"The  old  captain  was  a  picturesque  character,  and 
I  wrote  of  him — the  man  who  sailed  the  seven  seas. 
In  drawing  the  type,  I  did  not  choose  one  man — the 
various  captains  that  have  figured  in  my  books  are 
entirely  fictitious — for  it  seemed  to  me  that  it  was  hard 
to  find  one  man  who  could  fulfill  all  the  characteristics 
of  one  fictional  character.  My  captains  are  com 
posites  of  many  men,  as  I  felt  that  it  is  hardly  fair 
to  accurately  describe  a  living  man,  when  writing  fic 
tion.  .  .  . 

"The  same  is  true  with  the  other  characters  of  my 
books.  My  Cape  women  are  generally  true  to  type — 
big-hearted,  motherly  women  who  loved  the  sea.  My 
other  characters,  with  the  exception  of  the  Portuguese, 
whom  I  occasionally  mention  as  Cape  dwellers,  are 
obviously  drawn  from  the  city  types  one  sees  in  every 
day  life.  .  .  . 

"After  having  studied  the  man,  it  is  not  difficult  to 
imagine  what  he  would  do  in  certain  society.  In 
Cap'n  Warren's  Wards  I  took  my  Cape  Codder  to  the 
city  and  showed  that  his  high  sense  of  what  was  right 
and  wrong,  and  his  saving  sense  of  humor,  were  as 
much  in  evidence  in  one  place  as  is  another.  In  other 


JOSEPH  CROSBY  LINCOLN     183 

words,  a  good  man  is  the  same  everywhere.  And  in 
Kent  Knowles,  I  took  my  hero  to  England,  and  the 
contrast  made  the  story  a  revelation  of  the  Cape  Cod 

type/' 

Elsewhere  Mr.  Lincoln  has  said :  "I  know  there  are 
people  who  can  turn  out  a  short  story  in  two  or  three 
hours  and  it  will  be  good  enough  to  sell,  but  I  cannot 
help  feeling  that  it  would  have  been  much  better  if  the 
writer  had  devoted  more  time  to  it.  In  my  case, 
doing  work  that  is  satisfactory  to  me  in  any  degree 
means  that  I  must  fairly  sweat  it  out,  if  I  may  use 
the  expression." 

And  again,  in  an  interview  for  the  Boston  Globe: 
"A  man  writes  what  he  knows.  If  he  tries  anything 
else  it  must  fall — show  hollow.  And  I  find  that  it  is 
necessary  to  write  to  your  audience — that  one  must 
consider  that  a  large  number  of  his  readers  are  to  be 
women,  and  he  must  write  things  that  will  appeal  to 
the  women  of  to-day." 

But  Mr.  Lincoln  is  no  Sir  Oracle.  "Sweating" 
over  a  story  will  not  necessarily  improve  the  tale.  Mr. 
Edwin  Lefevre  wrote  The  Women  and  Her  Bonds — 
"which,  without  any  hesitation,"  says  Mr.  Arthur  B. 
Maurice,  one-time  editor  of  The  Bookman,  "is  to  be 
ranked  among  the  really  big  short  stories  of  Ameri 
can  fiction."  Mr.  Edwin  Lefevre  wrote  The  Woman 
and  Her  Bonds  at  a  single  sitting  before  breakfast 
.  .  .  and  Lincoln's  Gettysburg  speech  is  anything  but 
perspirational. 

So,  too,  when  the  author  of  Cap'n  Dan's  Daughter 
speaks  of  humor:  "Perhaps  I  could  write  a  story 
with  gloomy  situations  and  an  unhappy  ending,  but  I 


184   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

wouldn't  like  to  try  it.  I  would  much  rather  try  to 
make  people  cheerful  and  keep  myself  cheerful  at  the 
same  time.  There's  enough  sorrow  in  this  world  with 
out  finding  it  in  books."  Mr.  Lincoln — and  in  this  he 
is  certainly  one  with  the  thoughtless  folk  who  go 
to  make  up  the  great  American  reading  public — would 
dismiss  Othello  and  Lear  as  dismal  and  by  no  means  as 
valuable  as  a  torn  and  much-read  copy  of  Puck.  But 
I  would  not  barter  the  tears  of  life  for  all  the  laughter 
of  Cape  Cod. 

Mr.  Lincoln  lives  at  Hackensack,  New  Jersey,  and 
is  a  member  of  the  Hackensack  Golf  Club,  and  the 
Union  League  Club.  He  attends  the  Unitarian 
Church,  and  has  been  a  member  of  its  board  of  trus 
tees  for  about  ten  years.  For  the  past  several  years 
he  has  been  a  member  of  the  Hackensack  Board  of 
Education.  He  is,  so  I  hear  on  good  authority,  an 
extremely  agreeable  person,  somewhat  after  the  man 
ner  of  the  Justice  in  Shakespeare's  Seven  Ages,  in 
terlining  his  talk  with  quaint  instances,  proverbs  of 
the  sea,  the  natural  wisdom  of  men  who  have 
learned  from  life  rather  than  books.  And,  true  to  his 
endeavor,  he  keeps  those  about  him  cheerful  and  happy. 

MR.  LINCOLN'S  WORKS  INCLUDE: 

Cape  Cod  Ballads,  Cap'n  Eri,  Farters  of  the  Tide, 
Mr.  Pratt,  The  Old  Home  House,  Cy  Whit  taker's 
Place,  Our  Village,  Keziah  Coffin,  The  Depot  Master, 
Rise  of  Roscoe  Paine,  Mr.  Pratfs  Patients,  Cap'n 
Warren's  Wards,  The  Woman  Haters,  Cap'n  Dan's 
Daughter,  Kent  Knowles,  f{Quahaug,"  Thankful's  In 
heritance,  Mary  'Gusta,  Extricating  Obadiah. 


CHAPTER  XXXI 

FREEMAN  TILDEN 

I  appealed  to  Mr.  Freeman  Tilden,  author  of  Khaki, 
published  June,  1918,  dealing  with  Tredick — "Tredick 
is  represented  on  the  maps  by  a  small  round  black 
dot;  it  has  three  churches,  twenty-odd  stores,  several 
flourishing  industries  and  a  Carnegie  Library;  the 
main  street  is  called  Main  Street,  and  the  hotel  is 
called  the  Commercial  hotel" — I  appealed  to  Mr.  Free 
man  Tilden,  author  of  Khaki,  which  tells  how  Tredick 
got  into  the  war,  to  tell  me  something  of  himself,  his 
methods  of  work,  his  way  of  life,  his  thoughts  on 
literature.  Under  date  of  January  I4th,  1919, 
Mr.  Tilden  wrote  me  a  "long  and  rambling  letter" — 
the  phrase  is  his  own — hoping  that  I  might  get  "a 
glimpse  of  the  person  behind  it."  "It  is  not  often 
that  I  write  about  myself,"  he  says;  "I  think  the  only 
other  time  I  ever  told  the  story  of  my  life  was  when 
I  made  out  my  questionnaire  during  the  draft."  For 
fear  that  he  may  never  again  tell  that  story  and  for 
the  future  reference  of  all  literary  historians  I  will 
quote  him  here  at  some  length : — 

"I  was  born  in  Maiden,  Mass,  (near  Boston), 
August  22,  1883.  My  paternal  ancestors  were  Eng 
lish;  they  came  from  Tenterden,  England,  in  1628, 
eight  years  after  the  Mayflozver.  Maternal  ancestry 

185 


186   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

is  English-Irish.  So  far  as  I  know,  the  Tildens,  in 
that  two  hundred  and  fifty-odd  years  in  America, 
were  never  engaged  in  purely  intellectual  occupation 
until  my  father,  Samuel  Tilden,  became  a  newspaper 
editor,  after  having  been  a  master  printer.  They 
had  been  shipbuilders,  for  the  most  part. 

"As  I  grew  up  in  the  atmosphere  of  a  newspaper 
office,  it  was  not  unnatural  that  I  should  follow  in 
that  business.  My  newspaper  apprenticeship  was  at 
the  Boston  Globe.  Afterwards  I  was  with  the  News 
and  Courier  of  Charleston,  S.  C.,  and  then  came  to  the 
New  York  Evening  Post,  where  I  did  my  last  news 
paper  work.  To  say  truth,  the  newspaper  work  never 
enthralled  me.  I  regard  it  as  a  superior  training- 
school  ;  but  the  everlasting  ineffectually  and  'dailiness' 
of  it  wore  on  me.  I  was  not  a  good  newspaper  man.  I 
could  write  entertainingly,  but  I  never  acquired  the 
facility  for  intrusiveness,  which  is  the  reporter's  stock 
in  trade.  After  that,  (after  the  newspaper  training), 
I  traveled  a  good  deal  in  Europe  and  South  America. 
By  this,  I  do  not  mean  that  I  went  a-foot  or  adven 
turously.  My  notion  of  wild  adventure  wouid  not 
lead  me,  at  farthest,  to  do  more  than  spend  a  night  in 
a  third-rate  hotel.  I  marvel  at  those  who  'tramp' 
abroad.  To  make  a  journey  through  Siam  on  foot  is, 
to  be  sure,  a  novel  experience ;  but  I  think  as  prepara 
tion  for  fiction  one  would  do  better  to  cultivate  meet 
ings  of  the  Plumbers'  Union  or  the  Longshoreman's 
Literary  Society  or  Grocers'  Picnics.  That  is  my  no 
tion  ;  I  claim  no  merit  or  originality  for  it." 

Surely  something  of  the  man  is  here  present  between 
the  lines.  Having  entertained  but  few  illusions  con- 


FREEMAN  TILDEN  187 

cerning  life,  he  has  had  but  few  disappointments.  He 
was  not  disappointed  when  his  first  volume  of  fiction, 
That  Night  and  Other  Stories,  a  volume  of  satirical 
short  stories  collected  from  the  magazines  was  a  succes 
d'estime  and  not  another  Soldiers  Three.  It  was 
printed  here  and  in  England  and  sold  some  two  thou 
sand  copies — his  readers  were,  as  he  says,  truly  ad 
venturous.  Yet  he  was  not  disappointed,  because  he 
regarded  all  his  efforts  as  tentative.  "I  wanted  to 
find  out,"  he  tells  me,  "whether  there  was  a  public  in 
this  country  for  a  satire  of  a  delicately  wrought  kind. 
I  found  out.  There  is  not.  In  fact,  there  is  not 
much  of  that  public  in  the  world ;  the  older  the  culture 
(possibly)  the  larger  the  public,  but  it  can  never  be 
large."  Indeed  those  who  care  for  the  fine  arts  were 
never  legion;  and  satire — satire  serves  no  useful  pur 
pose,  according  to  those  who  seek  pleasure  in  their 
reading,  ease  and  forgetfulness. 

But  "there  is  very  little  common-sense,  however 
much  nobility,  in  pressing  the  inhabitants  of  Panama 
to  buy  snow-shoes.  Provided  a  man  is  cynical  to  be 
gin  with,  he  will  never  become  a  misanthrope  because 
the  world  will  not  roll  hoop  with  him — he  will  go  to 
another  world."  So  Mr.  Tilden  switched  to  popular 
fiction.  The  door  to  success  as  a  popular  writer  leads 
through  the  Saturday  Evening  Post;  and  through  that 
door  Mr.  Tilden  passed  to  become  the  author  of  Khaki. 
It  was  (he  confesses)  didactic;  it  was  unblushing;  but 
it  was  sincere,  and  it  had  a  large  audience.  Before 
that  he  had  written  other  books  with  which  we  need 
not  here  concern  ourselves — except  that  one  (so  he 


i88   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

believes),  non-fiction,  Second  Wind,  was  a  worthy  bit 
of  work  and  "has  had  good  hospitality/' 

"I  have  a  small  farm  in  the  Berkshire  Hills/'  he 
writes — and  he  writes  at  length  on  farming  for  the 
Country  Gentleman.  Being  a  farmer  myself  I  read 
his  articles,  though  I  seldom  pay  any  attention  to  the 
advice  he  gives  concerning  "intensive-extensive  farm 
ing/'  I  do  not  believe  that  he  himself  practices  what 
he  preaches.  In  the  winter  he  plans  what  he  will  do, 
large  operations — "but  when  summer  comes  I  am 
fatigued/'  he  says,  "so  I  sit  on  the  porch  and  read 
books  that  were  published  prior  to  1870.  This  does 
not  mean  that  all  books  published  prior  to  1870  were 
good  books.  Far  from  it.  Dreadful  rot  has  been 
printed  since  the  movable  types  came  into  use.  But 
pitiless  time  has  done  the  weeding. 

"Neither  my  philosophy,"  he  continues,  "nor  my 
position  in  life  or  literature  are  at  all  fixed.  They 
are  notably  fluid.  I  try  to  maintain  a  policy  of  benev 
olent  indifference — or,  if  that  sound  paradoxical,  you 
might  call  it  static  good-will.  My  notion  is  that  if 
you  attend  to  your  own  moral  and  spiritual  growth 
and  improvement,  other  people  will  thrive  better.  I 
would  as  lief  knock  a  man  down  and  trample  on  him 
as  prod  him  with  unasked  assistance.  But  if  he  be 
mentally  sick,  I  will,  if  he  seems  to  want  it,  practice 
any  sort  of  buffoonery  to  laugh  him  into  a  better  mood. 

"I  used  to  write  for  Puck  in  the  old  days  when  it 
was  a  humorous  paper  published  by  Keppler  and 
Schwarzmann.  So  I  passed,  and  do  pass,  for  a  hu 
morist.  But  that  I  am  surely  not — at  least,  not  in  the 
common  acceptation." 


FREEMAN  TILDEN  189 

What  remains?  Mr.  Tilden  is  very  successfully 
and  wholly  married  to  a  Vermont  girl  whose  name 
was  Mabel  Martin ;  they  have  three  children,  two  girls 
and  a  boy,  and  are  (so  he  declares)  "quite  domesti 
cated  and  happy." 


CHAPTER  XXXII 

LOUIS  JOSEPH  VANCE 

"I  had  a  thrill  the  other  night/'  writes  a  corre 
spondent  to  the  London  Daily  Mail:  "I  encountered 
a  badger  on  Hampstead  Heath."  Myself  (with 
Punch)  hesitate  to  think  what  he  would  have  encoun 
tered  if  he  had  had  two  or  three  thrills — or  if  he  had 
read  more  than  one  of  Mr.  Louis  Joseph  Vance's 
tales  of  mystery  and  adventure;  perhaps  the  Lone 
Wolf  in  Sheep's  Clothing,  Terence  O'Rourke,  Gentle 
man  Adventurer  with  a  Black  Bag,  or  the  Destroying 
Angel  come  with  a  Pool  of  Flame  in  a  Brass  Bowl  to 
drive  him,  a  hunted,  haunted  reader  of  fiction,  across 
the  holiday  Heath  out  into  No  Man's  Land. 

Listen  to  a  rapid-fire  description  of  the  latest  of 
these  tales,  The  False  Faces,  in  which  Mr.  Vance 
brings  back  to  life  his  widely  known  character, 
Michael  Lanyard,  the  Lone  Wolf,  amid  scenes  that 
carry  one  from  the  pock-marked  ground  where  men, 
no  mystery  about  it,  fight  and  fall  facing  a  trench- 
camouflaged,  invisible  foe,  to  the  blazing  lights  of  a 
garish  New  York  cafe  where  German  spies  meet  to 
plot  their  ways  of  wickedness.  Mr.  Vance  intro 
duces  the  central  figure  of  his  romance  (first  made 
famous  as  a  thief  of  international  reputation),  in  the 
guise  of  a  spy  devoted  to  the  cause  of  the  Allies — I 

190 


LOUIS  JOSEPH  VANCE  191 

trust  they  are  properly  flattered,  having  converted  a 
rogue  to  the  service  of  humanity.  .  .  .  "The  advan 
tage  is  with  him  who  fights  on  the  offensive,"  philoso 
phizes  the  extraordinary  Mr.  Lanyard — and  upon  this 
maxim  conducts  his  war  against  the  Prussians  in  such 
a  manner  that  the  mere  record  of  his  doings  is  (I  am 
assured)  "one  of  the  most  vivid,  realistic  and  timely 
pieces  of  war  fiction  that  has  yet  been  written" — or, 
as  the  Oakland  Tribune  has  it,  "of  its  kind  an  extra 
good  story"  .  .  .  "an  amazingly  convincing  story  of 
the  activities  of  the  Prussian  spy  system  in  our  very 
midst,"  says  the  publisher. 

All  this  makes  me  somewhat  ashamed  of  my  often- 
confessed  horror  of  such  tales,  of  mv  childish  fear  of 
ghosts  and  burglars — makes  me  as  a  critic  somewhat 
slow  in  admitting  that  I  have  never  been  able  to  read 
any  of  Mr.  Vance's  books.  They  are  of  their  kind, 
those  in  a  position  to  know  insist,  of  the  first  order. 
And  Mr.  Vance  himself,  Mr.  Barr  McCutcheon  tells 
me,  is  a  likable  and  interesting  chap.  He  may  be 
judged  from  a  letter  he  wrote  answering  an  appeal 
from  me  for  autobiographic  data : — 

"Your  request  is,  I  find,  one  with  which  it  is  pecu 
liarly  difficult  to  comply.  When  an  author  begins  to 
prattle  about  himself  he  commonly,  in  the  end,  stands 
self-revealed  as  an  insufferable  ass;  the  ego,  being 
mildly  petitioned  to  lay  aside  some  of  the  vestments 
of  its  proper  privacy,  seems  unable  to  refrain  from 
stripping  itself  stark  naked  and  running  wild,  with 
uncouth  shouts.  If  I  like  an  author  or  his  work  I 
never  read  the  stuff  he  writes  about  himself  for  pub 
lication;  otherwise  I  gloat  over  it.  My  own  impres- 


192   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

•ion  is  that  authors  as  a  class  are  rather  dull  people 
who  lead  rather  dull  lives;  a  few,  very  few,  are  either 
offensively  or  pleasingly  otherwise,  depending  on 
whether  they  know  it  or  not.  I  believe  their  work 
should  be  judged  and  written  about,  not  their  person 
alities,  providing  they  have  anything  of  the  sort.  I 
can't  imagine  what  there  would  be  in  my  private  life 
that  would  prove  interesting  to  anybody  except  my 
self  and  my  private  friends.  However,  I'll  do  my 
best  to  answer  your  questions,  in  the  hope  that  the 
information  elicited  will  prove  useful  to  you. 

"I'm  going  on  forty" — (he  was  born  in  Washington, 
September  19,  1879) — "I've  been  writing  rather  more 
than  less  steadily  and  voluminously  since  I  was 
twenty.  My  family  seems  to  have  been  middling 
respectable.  My  boyhood  was  normal.  My  school 
ing  at  Poly  Prep  (in  Brooklyn)  made  no  impression 
upon  me  of  which  I  am  now  sensible.  Of  my  maiden 
effort  I  retain  an  impression  even  more  vague,  though 
I  believe  it  was,  before  its  annihilation,  what  would 
to-day  be  termed  a  sex  story.  I  travel  when  I  can 
afford  it,  and  like  it,  partly,  I  presume,  because  I  can't 
work,  or  don't,  away  from  every-day  surroundings.  My 
experience  with  the  movies  has  been  extensive  and  in 
the  main  profitable,  but  otherwise  enervating.  I  get 
along  very  comfortably  with  the  magazines  and  have 
never  yet  published  anything  in  book  form  without 
first  selling  the  magazine  serial  rights.  My  first 
novel  was  written  in  sixty  days  at  the  rate  of  fifteen 
hundred  words  a  day  and  appeared  serially  in  Munsey's 
Magazine  and  in  no  other  form  anywhere;  it  was  a 
yarn  of  adventure.  My  latest  is  a  study  of  one  phase 


LOUIS  JOSEPH  VANCE  193 

of  social  life  in  New  York  and  is  so  brief  as  to  fall 
within  the  classification  of  'novelette.'  My  literary 
passions  are  mostly  prejudices ;  I  like  all  sorts  of  books, 
but  loathe  the  person  who  talks  to  me  in  a  sympatheic 
manner  about  my  stories  of  the  sort  that  they  call 
'detective  stories/  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  a  detective 
seldom  figures  in  any  of  them.  Having  written  the 
other  sort,  the  sort  admired  by  these  simple  souls,  I 
know  that  'detective  stories'  are  the  most  difficult  of 
all  to  write,  and  would  infinitely  rather  write  five 
so-called  psychological  or  social  studies  than  one  story 
of  mystery  and  adventure.  I  haven't  any  hobbies  that 
I  know  of.  My  way  of  work  is,  in  my  opinion,  hard. 
My  interests  in  art  and  life  are  comprehensive  and 
catholic  but,  unfortunately  I  fear,  not  concentrated.  I 
like  dogs,  cats,  horses,  boats,  people,  and  other  things 
that  make  me  forget  my  job.  I  don't  write  verse.  I 
don't  think  there's  any  fascination  in  the  double  B  in 
titles  or,  unless  it's  uncommonly  well  done,  in  mystery 
and  horror  and  spies. 

"I'm  afraid  there's  nothing  to  add  to  the  above.  I 
hope  very  truly  that  this  doesn't  seem  an  ungracious 
acknowledgment  of  your  courtesy.  It  isn't  meant  to 
be.  I've  really  tried  very  hard  to  think  up  something 
that  would  be  entertaining  to  your  readers,  but  some 
how  I  don't  find  my  subject  matter  inspiring." 


CHAPTER  XXXIII 

HAROLD  BELL  WRIGHT 

"It  is  his  almost  clairvoyant  power  of  reading  the 
human  soul/*  says  the  Portland,  Oregon,  Journal, 
"that  has  made  Mr.  Wright's  books  among  the  most 
remarkable  of  the  present  age." 

An  instance  from  The  Winning  of  Barbara  Worth, 
perhaps  his  best  and  best-known  novel : — 

"She  stood  before  him  in  all  the  beautiful  strength 
of  her  young  womanhood. 

"He  was  really  a  fine  looking  young  man  with  the 
appearance  of  being  exceptionally  well-bred  and  well- 
kept.  Indeed  the  most  casual  of  observers  would  not 
have  hesitated  to  pronounce  him  a  thoroughbred  and 
a  good  individual  of  the  best  type  that  the  race  has 
produced.  .  .  ." 

The  most  casual  observer,  you  will  notice — in  a 
word,  Mr.  Wright.  To  the  more  thoughtful  Mr.  Lin 
coln  is  the  best  type  of  individual  that  the  race  has 
as  yet  produced ;  and  he  was  anything  but  a  thorough 
bred,  anything  but  well-kept,  with  hands  as  huge  and 
thick  as  a  mallet,  great  bulging  feet  worn  tough  by 
traveling  the  road  that  leads  to  Calvary.  .  .  . 

Yet  it  may  interest  you  to  know  that  Mr.  Wright 
was  born  at  Rome,  New  York,  May  4,  1872;  that  he 
was  for  two  years  a  student  in  the  preparatory  depart- 

194 


HAROLD  BELL  WRIGHT  195 

ment  of  Hiram  College,  Ohio ;  that  he  has  been  suc 
cessively  sign-painter,  decorator,  landscape  painter, 
and  pastor  of  various  churches  in  Missouri,  Kansas 
and  California;  that  his  first  book,  That  Printer  of 
Udell's,  having  been  published  in  1903,  to  be  followed 
by  The  Shepherd  of  the  Hills  in  1907,  he  retired  from 
the  ministry  in  1908  to  devote  himself  to  writing;  that 
he  now  lives  in  Los  Angeles,  California ;  and  that  over 
seven  million  copies  of  his  eight  novels  have  been  sold 
— that  he  has,  with  the  most  meagre  equipment,  made 
his  name  a  by-word  in  the  land  to  all  such  critics  as  I 
am  presumed  to  be  (haughty  and  proud)  and  a  bless 
ing  to  the  thousands  upon  thousands  who  crave  to  see 
their  humble  doings,  their  paper  phantasies  exalted  and 
made  memorable  in  the  bright  guise  of  a  seeming 
romance — that  he  is  one  of  the  most  remarkable  crea 
tures  of  our  day  and  generation,  a  poor  relation  trail 
ing  behind  Poe  and  Whitman  and  Dreiser  into  the 
realms  of  criticism,  yet  (by  the  astounding  clamor  he 
evokes)  drawing  all  eyes;  one  easily  explained  (as  by 
Mr.  Cabell)  but  not  to  be  explained  away.  .  .  . 

His  method  of  work  deserves  a  moment's  atten 
tion  : — • 

"The  system  I  use,"  says  Mr.  Wright,  in  an  inter 
view  in  the  Bookman,  "may  have  been  used  for  cen 
turies,  or  it  may  be  no  one  else  has  ever  used  it.  I 
have  wondered  whether  it  is  old  or  new.  Whichever 
it  may  be  here  it  is.  ... 

"When  I  start  to  write  a  novel,  the  first  thing  I  do 
is  to  figure  out  why  I  am  going  to  write  it.  Not  what 
is  the  story,  but  why?  I  mull  this  over  a  while,  and 


ig6   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

when  it  13  pretty  straight  in  my  mind,  I  write  out  an 
argument.  .  .  . 

"No  suggestion  of  plot,  you  see.  No  incidents, 
scenes,  location,  nothing  done  at  first  except  the  argu 
ment,  but  it  is  the  heart  and  soul  of  the  novel  The 
novel  is  merely  this  argument  presented  through  the 
medium  of  characters,  plots,  incidents,  and  the  other 
properties  of  the  story.  .  .  . 

"Next  come  the  characters,  each  standing  for  some 
element  or  factor  in  the  argument.  Up  to  the  last 
copying  of  the  Eyes  of  the  World,  not  a  character  has 
been  named.  They  were  called  in  the  copy,  Greed, 
Ambition,  Youth,  or  whatever  they  represented  to  me 
in  the  writing  of  the  story.  .  .  ." 

In  a  phrase,  Mr.  Wright  seeks  to  prove  some  ab 
stract  notion  of  his  own  concerning  good  and  evil  by 
means  of  a  picked  assembly  of  human  beings. 

I  discussed  this  way  of  writing  with  Mr.  Percy 
Mackaye,  pointing  out  that  Mr.  Wright  had  taken  a 
leaf  from  Bunyan's  book  and  set  up  as  a  progressive 
pilgrim,  glimpsing  afar  the  city  of  light — that  When 
a  Man's  a  Man  is  allegory. 

Mr.  Mackaye  agreed  that  it  should  have  been;  but 
insisted  that  it  was  not  true  that  any  human  being  ever 
could  have  personified  Greed  or  Ambition  or  Youth 
or  anything  else  that  Mr.  Wright  might  arbitrarily 
decide  they  should  represent  when  he  sits  down  to 
write  a  story;  that  in  changing  Ambition  to  Bill  Bald 
win  and  Greed  to  Carlos  Mackenzie  and  Youth  to 
Viola  Dana  he  was  vilifying  (or  deifying,  as  the  case 
might  be)  mankind — that  he  was  guilty  of  bearing 
false  witness  against  his  fellow-man.  .  .  . 


HAROLD  BELL  WRIGHT  197 

All  of  which  is  true. 

Further — Bunyan  was  a  tinker  and  taking  the 
language  of  tinkers,  the  vernacular  of  byway  and 
tavern,  moulding  it  to  his  uses,  he  immensely  enriched 
our  speech.  John  Millington  Synge  wrote  under  the 
roofs  of  those  whose  talk  is  racy  of  the  soil,  rugged 
and  strong  as  the  bare  hills  on  which  stray  sheep 
nibble  among  the  gorse.  Mr.  Wright  sat  at  the  feet 
of  the  prosaic,  his  English  not  so  much  of  the  earth  as 
mine,  and  missed  a  golden  opportunity;  he  tells  of  the 
West,  the  West  where  men  are  free  to  grow  like  weeds, 
rank  and  prolific;  the  West  where  women  are  gaunt 
and  upright,  withering  slowly  in  the  wind;  the  West 
where  younger  sons  and  cut-throats  go  to  seek  for 
tune — in  the  lifeless  copy  of  exercise  books. 

THE  TITLES  OF  MR.  WRIGHT'S  NOVELS  ARE: 

That  Printer  of  Udell's  (1903),  The  Shepherd  of 
the  Hills  (1907),  The  Calling  of  Dan  Matthews 
(1909),  The  Uncrowned  King  (1910),  The  Winning 
of  Barbara  Worth  (1911),  Their  Yesterdays  (1912), 
The  Eyes  of  the  World  (1914),  When  a  Man's  a  Man 
(1916),  Recreation  of  Donald  Bret  (just  an 
nounced). 


CHAPTER  XXXIV 

ELIAS  TOBENKIN 

The  family  Bible  in  which  births  and  deaths  were 
recorded  was  lost  early  in  his  childhood,  and  Mr. 
Tobenkin  is  not  certain  whether  he  was  born  on  the 
fourth  or  the  eleventh  of  February,  1882.  (Who's 
Who  in  America  has  hit  upon  the  tenth  as  a  likely 
date.)  Of  one  thing,  however,  he  is  sure,  and  that 
is  that  he  was  born  prematurely  and  in  haste.  He 
has  in  consequence  always  been  just  a  little  ahead 
of  schedule.  Sometimes  the  haste  was  of  his  own 
making — as  when,  long  before  Colonel  Roosevelt,  he 
coined  the  phrase  "hyphenated  Americans"  to  denote 
trie  unassimilated  masses  of  our  immigrant  popula 
tion — more  often  it  was  forced  upon  him  from  the 
outside. 

An  instance :  He  was  reporting  on  the  San  Fran 
cisco  Examiner.  One  evening  in  February,  1915,  the 
managing  editor  came  up  to  his  desk  and  commis 
sioned  him  to  cover  the  Exposition  for  the  paper. 
He  was  to  go  out  the  very  next  morning,  and  make  a 
study  of  the  grounds,  buildings,  exhibits,  etc.,  and 
prepare  six  articles,  giving  a  comprehensive  and  com 
posite  picture  of  the  fair,  to  be  used  in  the  Sunday 
edition.  The  articles  were  to  be  ready  in  two  weeks. 
Two  days  later  the  editor  sent  for  him  and  asked  if 

198 


ELIAS  TOBENKIN  199 

the  articles  could  not  be  finished  in  three  days — nine 
days  ahead  of  schedule — and  they  were.  Mr.  Toben- 
kin  was  rewarded  by  the  M.E.  with  an  assignment 
requiring  even  more  speed. 

He  hails  from  Russia  and  is  of  Jewish  extraction. 
Of  the  city  of  his  birth  he  will  not  speak — though 
he  thinks  "one  should  be  fond  of  one's  birthplace  and 
say  nice  things  about  it" — because  that  part  of  Rus 
sia  has  been  for  so  long  under  German  control  that 
little  now  remains  of  the  Old  World  he  knew  in  child 
hood. 

"My  father,"  he  says,  "always  remained  a  stranger 
in  the  town  where  I  was  born.  For  as  long  as  I  can 
remember  I  was  his  only  confidant.  Walking  was  a 
passion  with  him  and  from  my  third  year  I  was  his 
constant  companion.  As  we  went  through  the  fields 
or  up  into  the  forest  that  skirted  the  edge  of  town  he 
would  tell  me,  dramatically,  and  with  many  a  sweep 
of  the  hand,  heroic  tales  out  of  the  Old  Testament. 
I  was,  therefore,  familiar  with  a  great  part  of  its 
contents  long  before  I  knew  the  alphabet.  It  served 
as  my  first  textbook.  We  journeyed  with  kings  and 
prophets  as  we  walked. 

"My  mother  also  played  a  great  part  in  my  early 
education,  singing  me  songs  in  Russian  and  in  Ukrai 
nian,  the  yearning  melancholy  songs  of  the  people. 
Wonderful  songs  they  were,  and  it  often  happens,  as 
I  walk  down  Broadway,  that  something  I  see  or  hear 
recalls  the  past,  the  Old  World,  and  then  the  noise 
dies  down,  the  faces  of  people  and  of  skyscrapers 
disappear  in  a  haze,  and  I  see  before  me  my  dead 
mother  and  hear  her  voice  singing  the  old  sad  songs 


200   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

of  Russia.  .  .  .  Reality  becomes  a  dream  and  the 
dream  reality.  .  .  . 

"I  was,  for  a  long  time,  an  only  child  and  my 
father's  hopes  and  ambitions  were  centered  in  me. 
It  so  happened  that  America  early  took  hold  of  my 
imagination.  My  dreams  were  of  America,  my  great 
est  wish  to  go  there.  In  order  that  I  might  realize 
my  dreams  my  father  sailed  for  the  New  World. 
When  he  had  prepared  a  home  the  family  followed." 

In  1905  Mr.  Tobenkin  graduated  from  the  Uni 
versity  of  Wisconsin.  In  1906,  having  specialized  in 
German  literature  and  philosophy,  he  received  his 
Master's  degree.  He  immediately  went  into  news 
paper  work,  reporting  for  the  Milwaukee  Free  Press 
and,  a  year  later,  being  turned  loose  on  the  town,  doing 
special  articles  for  the  Chicago  Herald.  Then  fol 
lowed  three  years  of  free  lance  journalism  in  New 
York.  In  1912  he  returned  to  Chicago  to  accept  a 
regular  position  with  the  Tribune.  He  had  been  on 
the  staff  for  some  months  as  special  writer  when  the 
publisher,  Mr.  Joseph  Medill  Patterson,  offered  a 
prize  for  the  best  editorial  on  a  non-political  subject 
by  any  one  on  the  paper  not  then  an  editorial  writer. 
Mr.  Tobenkin  won  the  prize  with  an  editorial  con 
cerning  six  men  put  to  death  in  Sing  Sing  on  one 
morning.  He  pointed  out  that  America  was  not  alto 
gether  blameless  for  the  careers  of  these  men.  He 
showed  how  the  neglect  of  the  immigrant  by  Amer 
ican  society  indirectly  helps  to  drive  a  great  number 
to  crime.  He  was  immediately  promoted  to  the  edi 
torial  staff.  Mr.  Patterson  said:  "You  have  been 
showing  us  what  you  have  seen  in  the  slums;  you 


ELIAS  TOBENKIN  201 

have  given  us  the  facts.  Now  give  us  the  remedy. 
You  have  shown  us  the  problem;  show  us  the  solu 
tion/' 

It  was  in  this  way  that  he  became  one  of  the  chief 
interpreters  of  the  immigrant  and  his  life  to  the  na 
tive  American  reader.  In  1916,  having  covered  the 
San  Francisco  Exposition  for  the  Hearst  Syndicate, 
he  joined  the  staff  of  the  Metropolitan  Magazine  to 
write  on  economics.  He  has  filled  in  his  spare  time 
with  articles  and  stories  for  the  Survey,  the  American 
Magazine,  Harper's  Weekly  and  many  another.  He 
has  written  two  novels. 

The  first  of  his  novels,  Witte  Arrives,  was  pub 
lished  in  1916.  It  deals  with  a  family  of  Jewish 
immigrants  who  settle  in  a  small  Middle-Western 
city  and  in  especial  with  Emil,  the  youngest  of  three 
children,  and  his  gradual  transformation  from  a  timid 
exile  of  the  Pale  into  an  upright  American  citizen. 
Aaron  the  father  is  a  peddlar,  a  strictly  orthodox 
Jew,  who  comes,  despite  his  poverty,  to  hold  a  high 
place  in  the  respect  of  his  neighbors  and  to  be  the 
chief  influence  molding  the  character  of  his  son. 
"Family  life  among  the  Jews,"  as  Professor  Lyon 
Phelps  remarks,  "has  always  been  held  up  as  a  model 
to  humanity,  and  the  bond  between  father  and  son  is 
portrayed  in  this  novel  with  the  beauty  of  holiness." 

Yet  the  story  is  biographical  rather  than  artistic. 
"I  am  trying  to  report  life  in  my  novels/'  says  Mr. 
Tobenkin.  And  for  him  life  is  a  serious  business. 
There  is  the  everlasting  "bread  and  contentment" 
problem.  Emil  is  attempting  "to  wrest  from  life  the 
happiness  which  is  his  due."  I  do  not  think  he  can 


202   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

prove  his  claim  to  happiness,  but  that  is  neither  here 
nor  there.  He  is  earnest  in  his  ambition.  His  story 
much  resembles  Mr.  Tobenkin's.  He  graduates  from 
the  university  and  gets  a  job  in  the  nearby  city  report 
ing  obituaries  and  the  doings  of  labor.  He  becomes 
deeply  interested  in  the  people  of  the  tenements, 
studies  their  ways  of  work  and  play,  writes  sympa 
thetically  of  their  hopes  and  ambitions,  tells  of  their 
despair,  and  makes  for  himself  a  place  in  the  news 
paper  world.  He  marries  young  and  the  tale  of  his 
harassed  home  is  recounted  with  a  wealth  of  under 
standing  detail.  His  wife  Helen  dies  in  child-birth, 
leaving  him  desolate,  broken  in  health  and  spirit,  just 
as  life  seemed  to  be  opening  to  them  the  gates  of 
an  earthly  paradise.  He  returns  to  the  house  of  his 
father  and  the  old  man,  widowed  and  lonely  for  his 
son,  nurses  him  back  to  a  faith  in  his  own  destiny. 
During  a  long  convalescence  he  works  on  the  novel 
which  is  to  present  to  the  great  world  the  best  of  his 
thoughts  and  dreams  wrung  from  the  experience  of 
youth  by  hands  as  gentle  as  a  mother's.  The  novel 
almost  complete,  at  the  urgent  request  of  his  friend 
George  Graves,  night  editor  on  a  metropolitan  daily, 
he  returns  to  New  York  to  become  re-write  man  on 
the  same  paper.  With  the  help  of  Graves  and  the 
aid  and  advice  of  Barbara  Graves,  his  sister,  the  novel 
is  whipped  into  final  shape  and  accepted  for  publica 
tion.  Witte  has  arrived. 

Sincere  and  earnest,  the  book  is  nevertheless  little 
better  than  a  promise.  There  is  about  it  too  much 
of  the  raw  and  shallow  inconsequence  of  youth,  the 
sapient  paraphrase  of  journalism  that  would  at  once 


ELIAS  TOBENKIN  203 

delight,  instruct  and  uplift.  The  restless  desires  of 
the  various  characters,  their  ambitious  struggles  for 
wealth  and  fame,  their  tawdry  disappointments,  seem 
to  one  who  has  considered  the  lilies  futile  and  empty 
of  meaning.  There  is  no  laughter  in  the  situations, 
no  splendor  as  of  setting  suns  that  herald  in  the  night 
when  rest  is  sweetest.  Mr.  Tobenkin  is  alien  to  a 
world  that  in  crimson  and  gold,  with  pomp  of  kings 
and  ritual  of  priests,  flaunting  banners  of  war  and 
gay  festivals  of  carnival,  makes  beautiful  the  house 
in  which  its  children  dwell.  To  him  the  daisies  sway 
ing  listless  in  the  wind,  the  brook  mocking  with  rip 
ple  of  nonsense,  the  proudly  steadfast  trees,  speak 
only  of  the  vanity  of  vanities.  His  phrasing  is  often 
banal  and  commonplace,  the  same  words  recurring 
again  and  again  in  identical  order;  his  English  is 
sometimes  atrocious. 

But  in  The  Home  of  Conrad,  published  in  1918, 
his  art  has  made  great  strides.  It  is  an  incomparably 
finer  piece  of  work,  "vastly  bigger  than  his  first  novel," 
as  Mr.  F.  T.  Cooper  insists  contradicting  the  New 
York  Times.  It  opens  in  the  spring  of  1866  when 
Gottfried,  Conradi  arrives  in  New  York  from  Ger 
many,  one  of  the  first  of  the  followers  of  Ferdinand 
Lassalle  to  come  to  America.  In  the  Old  World  he 
had  been  a  bookbinder,  but  the  Germans  in  New  York 
with  whom  he  first  became  acquainted  were  for  the 
most  part  cigar-makers,  so  he  sets  about  learning  the 
new  trade.  Within  a  year  he  had  saved  passage 
money  for  his  Annchen  and  sent  for  her.  They  settle 
in  Kleindeutchland  on  the  east  side.  He  dedicates 
himself,  his  son,  The  House  of  Conrad,  which  with 


204   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

the  birth  of  his  son  has  come  into  existence,  to  the  serv 
ice  of  humanity.  It  is  the  history  through  three  gen 
erations  of  that  dedicated  house  which  Mr.  Tobenkin 
relates  in  this  new  novel  with  an  intimacy  of  knowl 
edge  and  a  fairness  of  judgment  that  astounds  and 
convinces  the  most  casual  of  readers.  He  has  ob 
served  his  characters  at  home  and  on  their  walks  about 
the  world,  eaten  their  bread  and  salt,  drunk  their 
water  and  wine.  It  is  an  amazing  performance. 

"America,"  to  quote  Mr.  Cooper  again,  "so  the 
author  seems  to  say,  is  very  patient  with  her  new 
children,  the  immigrants.  They  come  here  arro 
gantly  thinking  to  teach  her.  But  through  the  slow 
attrition  of  years  it  is  she  who  does  the  teaching.  This 
is  the  essential  point  in  a  novel  which  in  its  breadth 
and  far-reaching  truth  ranks  very  high  among  the 
best  contemporary  pictures  of  Americanism."  It  is  a 
point  highly  flattering  to  native  Americans.  And  yet 
that  such  a  novel  should  be  written  by  an  immigrant 
affords  evidence  that  America  in  offering  a  home  to 
the  driven  exiles  from  Europe  sometimes  receives  far 
more  than  she  gives. 


CHAPTER  XXXV 

ARTHUR  BULLARD 

Mr.  Ernest  Poole  has  very  kindly  contributed  the 
following  few  paragraphs  concerning  Mr.  Arthur  Bui- 
lard,  known,  until  recently,  as  Albert  Edwards,  au 
thor  of  Comrade  Yetta  and  A  Man's  World 

"Since  Arthur  Bullard  began  to  write  about  fifteen 
years  ago,  his  work  has  been  prophetic  of  the  world 
wide  crisis  existing  to-day. 

"He  was  born  in  St.  Joseph,  Mo.,  in  about  1880'* — 
December  8,  1879.  "He  came  East  to  school,"  gradu 
ating  from  the  Blair  Presbyterian  Academy,  Blairs- 
town,  N.  J.,  1899,  "and  to  college/'  Hamilton  College, 
Clinton,  N.  Y.,  where  he  spent  about  two  years. 
"When  about  twenty-one  he  became  engrossed  in  prob 
lems  of  poverty,  crime  and  social  justice.  In  New 
York  he  served  as  a  probation  officer" — employed  by 
the  Prison  Association  of  New  York,  1903-6;  he  was 
also  connected  with  the  University  Settlement,  where 
(doubtless)  he  first  became  acquainted  with  Mr.  Poole 
— "and  lived  for  a  while  on  the  lower  East  Side.  He 
never  thought  of  writing  at  first.  He  was  forced  to 
write  by  the  compulsion  of  the  things  he  learned  in  the 
tenements. 

"His  novels,  A  Man's  World  and  Comrade  Yetta, 
are  interesting  reading  now  to  one  who  is  trying  to 

205 


206   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

trace  back  the  sources  of  the  class  wars  raging  to-day. 
His  interest  in  such  movements  took  him  to  Russia  in 
1905.  With  characteristic  thoroughness,  he  spent 
nearly  a  year  in  Switzerland,  learning  the  Russian 
language — and  after  that,  for  two  or  three  years,  he 
spent  most  of  his  time  in  Russia. 

"So  far,  his  development  was  not  unlike  that  of 
other  young  American  writers.  But  about  ten  years 
ago  his  interest  was  led  more  and  more  from  the 
struggle  between  the  rich  and  the  poor  to  the  possi 
bilities  of  war  between  different  nations.  This  kept 
him  in  Europe  at  least  half  the  time.  He  was  in  Tur 
key  and  Bulgaria  at  the  time  of  the  Young  Turk 
movement  there.  He  spent  much  time  also  in  Eng 
land  and  France  and  North  Africa,  He  wrote  maga 
zine  articles  and  later  a  book  on  the  old  diplomacy  and 
the  first  vague  signs  of  the  new.  Soon  after  the 
present  war  broke  out  he  went  to  London  for  some 
months  and  after  that  to  Paris.  Later  he  returned  to 
this  country  convinced  that  we  must  enter  the  war. 
About  eight  months  later,  in  June,  1917,  he  went  as 
correspondent  to  Russia  and  remained  there  for  our 
government  until  this  winter,  when  severe  illness 
brought  him  home  from  Siberia.  The  book  he  will 
write  on  Russia  will  doubtless  be  an  immensely  valu 
able  piece  of  work. 

"Bullard  as  a  writer  has  a  distinctive  quality,  espe 
cially  in  his  fiction.  His  novel,  A  Man's  World,  was 
regarded  here  as  marking  the  beginning  of  a  new 
development  in  American  fiction  writing.  But  signifi 
cant  and  forcible  as  is  his  work  as  a  writer,  Bullard 
is  rather  known  to  his  friends  for  his  rare  personal 


ARTHUR  BULLARD  207 

qualities.  A  man  almost  constantly  traveling  from 
country  to  country,  he  delights  in  mixing  with  all  sorts 
of  people,  to  talk  and  to  listen.  And  his  talk  is  so 
good  that  now  he  has  innumerable  friends  in  hundreds 
of  big  cities,  towns  and  villages  all  over  the  world  who 
are  always  eager  to  welcome  him  and  to  learn  what 
he  has  picked  up  since  they  saw  him  last.  For  he  is 
not  only  a  man  they  like,  but  one  who  (they  know)  is 
constantly  growing,  quite  unconsciously,  and  widening 
and  deepening  his  view  of  the  world's  life  in  these  stir 
ring  days." 


CHAPTER  XXXVI 

JOSEPH  ANTHONY 

Hope  is  not,  as  a  rule,  held  out  to  the  prodigy,  lest 
he  fulfill  a  promise  and  so  upset  the  calculations  of 
those  who  impose  their  will  upon  the  world  by  cal 
culating — lest  he  make  of  the  serious  a  mockery  in  the 
eyes  of  fools.  And  Mr.  Joseph  Anthony  is  scarce 
above  the  age  of  discretion.  'Twould  be  indiscreet 
of  him  to  back  up  his  claim  to  our  attention — limited 
at  present,  to  one  novel — by  following  Rekindled  Fires 
with  a  suburban  tragedy  retelling  in  terms  of  Summit, 
N.  J.,  the  story  of  Hedda  Gabler. 

I  do  not  recall,  for  the  moment,  the  title  of  young 
Keats'  first  published  verse,  but  I  do  know  that  he  set 
no  worlds  afire  the  day  he  launched  into  print — neither 
did  he  disappoint  his  printer.  And  when  you  have 
said  that  Rekindled  Fires  is  this  and  that,  you  have 
not  told  the  half  of  all  that  should  be  read  between 
the  lines.  Stanislav  Zabransky,  pushing  a  cart  laden 
with  fresh  vegetables  along  the  streets  of  Mil  ford,  on 
the  edge  of  the  Jersey  meadows,  is  introduced  with  a 
humor,  not,  perhaps,  at  all  unusual,  but  spontaneous 
and  youthfully  charming;  and  his  reading  of  The 
Talisman — we  all  remember  The  Talisman — is  noted 
as  an  echo  of  that  romance  that  makes  of  life  (to  those 
capable  of  spelling  out  their  words)  a  great  adventure. 

208 


JOSEPH  ANTHONY  209 

His  father,  Michael  Zabransky,  his  mother,  his  sister, 
his  brother,  are  bodied  forth  out  of  reality  and  pic 
tured  with  a  sympathy  which  makes  of  humanity  the 
stuff  of  dreams. 

Stanislav  Zabransky,  a  weaker  son,  youngest  of  a 
family,  come  from  Bohemia  to  try  the  promise  of 
America,  grows  up  to  become  Stanley  Zabriskie,  an 
American ;  and  the  father's  sturdy  Bohemian  idealism, 
burning  to  ash,  is  rekindled  to  flame  in  the  last  of  his 
children.  But  Rekindled  Fires  is  not,  in  the  ordinary 
sense  of  the  phrase,  a  "melting  pot"  novel.  The  boy 
is  not  made  over  in  America;  rather  what  he  might 
have  been  had  he  lived  in  a  less  tyrannized  Bohemia 
he  becomes  among  his  transplanted  people  over  here. 
And  this  is  as  it  should  be,  for  the  mere  accident  of 
being  in  America  neither  makes  nor  unmakes  a  man. 
True  enough,  environment  aids  in  the  development  of 
character;  and  the  soil  here  is  favorable  to  a  natural 
growth  of  all  that  is  best  and  healthiest — but  good 
seed  must  be  planted.  Good  seed,  strong  roots,  are 
sometimes  brought  over  from  the  old  world.  Too 
often,  I  think,  the  debt  we  owe  to  those  who  dared 
sever  all  ties  and  cross  the  seas,  like  folk  in  a  fairy-tale, 
to  seek  a  fortune  here  in  our  half-mythical  country  is 
overlooked  in  lavish  praise  of  those  who  have  merely 
waited  for  our  homage — rather  than  brave  conven 
tion — among  the  smug  comforts  of  Beacon  Street  and 
Charleston,  S.  C.  Because  he  knows  and  appreciates 
the  value  of  the  immigrant,  because  he  understands 
him,  sees  him  with  humor  and  liking,  I  look  to  Mr. 
Joseph  Anthony  for  many  good  things — books  and 
sealing-wax  and,  possibly  (if  he  takes  to  farming), 


210  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

cabbages.  .  .  .  Being  a  farmer  and  a  reader  of  Mon 
sieur  Anatole  France,  I  am  myself  inclined  to  believe 
that  "it  is  wiser  to  plant  cabbages  than  to  write  books" ; 
but  Mr.  Joseph  Anthony  must  choose  for  himself. 

"My  mother,"  he  writes  me,  "is  still  mourning  the 
passing  of  the  quiet  home  district  of  New  York  where, 
in  April,  1897,  I  was  born — quiet  Pitt  Street!  My 
parents  were  both  born  in  Hungary,  but  they  came 
dren  heard. 

"But  I  have  a  much  more  vivid  recollection  of  the 
fairy  tales  I  read  than  of  the  things  I  saw  and  heard. 
Throughout  my  school  days,  while  my  elder  brothers, 
Sidney  and  Edward,  were  playing  baseball,  football, 
and  'cat/  I  was  reading — fairy  tales  (I  am  not  averse 
to  reading  them  all  over  again  now),  Scott,  Horatio 
Alger,  Cooper,  Henty,  Dickens,  Mark  Twain:  one 
author  was  about  as  good  as  another.  By  the  way, 
Br'er  Ed,  who  never  took  books  too  seriously,  has 
just  blossomed  out  as  a  playwright;  and  the  book 
worm  can  make  him  step  lively  on  a  tennis  court. 

"My  ambition  to  write  dates  from  the  time  when 
the  English  teacher  in  Public  School  24  read  my  first 
composition  and  solemnly  assured  me  that  'it  runs  in 
the  family/  She  had  had  Ed  in  her  class  before  and 
we  each  had  a  faculty  for  polysyllabic  words  that 
brought  joy  to  her  heart.  When  I  graduated  P.  S.  24 
at  the  age  of  twelve,  I  was  turned  loose  to  write  a 
valedictorian  poem.  It  was  a  long  poem,  but  my  im 
pression  is  that  there  were  not  very  many  words  in  it. 
At  any  rate  it  was  never  read,  for  at  the  last  moment 


JOSEPH  ANTHONY  211 

no  hall  was  available  for  exercises,  and  the  valedic 
torian  was  left  high  and  dry. 

"At  Townsend  Harris  High  School  I  consoled  my 
self  for  this  loss  by  joining  the  Webb  Literary  Society, 
where  poems  and  stories  were  read  and  criticized  of  a 
Friday  afternoon  by  Harrisites  of  a  distinctly  tragical 
bent.  I  had  spent  a  year  and  a  half  at  Townsend 
when  my  father  carried  his  fur  business  and  family 
to  Hackensack,  N.  J.  When  I  had  partly  recovered 
from  the  misery  of  being  cut  off  from  my  Webb 
friends,  I  proceeded  to  put  them  into  immortal  story 
in  the  Hackensack  High  School  Critic  in  a  serial  en 
titled  The  Tale  of  the  Order  of  Goats,  which  I  signed 
'Jayar/  All  the  characters  of  this  serial  are  alive  and 
in  evidence,  but  they  have  been  growing  so  fast  in  the 
last  few  years  that  it  looks  as  though  there  really  ought 
to  be  a  sequel. 

"On  Graduating  H.  H.  S.  in  1913  I  began  at  once 
to  push  a  typewriter  in  the  joint  service  of  the  town 
Board  of  Education  and  the  Bergen  News.  Getting 
locals'  for  the  News  brought  me  five  dollars  a  week, 
clerking  for  the  Board  eight.  Writing  poetry  for  the 
News  nothing  at  all.  But  when  I  left  the  sheet  it 
promptly  lay  down  and  died,  and  it  has  not  been  resur 
rected  since. 

"I  saved  enough  money  to  pay  for  a  semester's  tui 
tion  at  Columbia  College,  and  entered  in  1914.  During 
the  next  three  years  I  did  nothing  at  all  but  go  through 
the  Bachelor  of  Arts  course,  commute  between  Hack 
ensack  and  New  York,  do  some  tutoring  and  a  little 
writing,  and  act  as  the  travelling  representative  of  a 
New  Jersey  chain  of  business  schools.  It  was  while  I 


212   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

was  touring  northern  New  Jersey  as  the  apostle  of  a 
business  education  that  I  came  to  know  the  people  I 
told  of  in  Rekindled  Fires. 

"During  this  time  I  was  a  devoted,  if  delinquent, 
member  of  the  Boar's  Head  Literary  Society,  where 
Columbia  Litterateurs  gathered  once  a  fortnight 
mainly  for  the  inspiration  of  Professor  John  Erskine. 
I  still  think  that  there  was  a  conspiracy  somewhere  to 
prevent  my  being  a  poet.  One  Boar's  Head  audience 
rose  as  a  man  to  demand  that  I  tell  them  the  subject 
of  a  certain  serious  poem — after  I  had  read  them  the 
poem.  Professor  Erskine,  in  whose  English  class  I 
wrote  the  first  four  chapters  of  Rekindled  Fires, 
merely  smiled  and  urged  me  to  stick  to  prose.  During 
my  freshman  year  I  sometimes  wandered  into  the  pre 
cincts  of  the  School  of  Journalism.  There  Professor 
Walter  B.  Pitkin,  the  prophet  of  the  west  side  of  the 
campus,  devastated  my  heart  utterly  by  devoting  a 
whole  philosophy  lecture  to  proving  the  mental  in 
feriority  of  the  race  of  poets.  The  next  day  I  nailed 
this  thesis  to  his  chapel  door.  (I  found  it  on  the 
bulletin  board  later,  with  'More  Atrocities  from  the 
Trenches'  written  across  it  in  Professor  Pitkin's  writ 
ing).  .  .  . 

The  masters  of  your  heart  and  soul, 

Whose  words  have  set  the  world  aglow, 

You  think  they  play  a  brainy  role  ? 
Doc.  Pitkin  briefly  answers:  "No." 

What  poet  had  an  intellect 

Among  your  Byrons  and  your  Poes? 


JOSEPH  ANTHONY  213 

"Why,"  says  the  Prof.,  "with  all  respect, 
The  bum  ones  only,  heaven  knows." 

As  thus  I  see  my  ideal  smashed, 
My  loved  pursuit  held  up  to  scorn, 

Do  I  proclaim  my  heart  is  gashed? 
Do  I  don  somber  black  and  mourn? 

Do  I,  impelled  by  mounting  ire, 

Denounce  the  world  as  wholly  wrong? 

I  don't.  Suffused  with  lyric  fire, 
I  burst  into  this  simple  song: 

"Oh,  I  am  free  from  cares  and  fears ; 

Upon  my  brow  no  sorrow  reigns; 
I  know  no  cares,  no  sighs,  no  tears — 

I  cannot,  for  I  have  no  brains. 

"So  let  me  live,  a  poet  daff, 

And  when  my  simple  life  is  done, 

Write  this  upon  my  epitaph: 
'He  flunked  Philosophy  J  i.'  " 

"After  graduating  Columbia,  I  finished  Rekindled 
Fires,  in  the  summer  of  1917,  working  at  night.  I 
threw  up  my  job,  took  'it*  to  the  office  of  Henry  Holt 
&  Co.,  left  it  there  with  the  explanation:  'This  is  a 
novel,'  and  went  to  Newark  to  look  for  work.  When 
the  acceptance  came  six  weeks  later,  I  was  covering 
the  federal  round  on  the  Newark  Evening  News. 

"As  to  the  future  ...  I  have  lots  of  plans — if  only 
Uncle  Sam  will  muster  me  out  of  the  navy !" 


CHAPTER  XXXVII 

OWEN   MC  MAHON  JOHNSON 

Elsewhere  in  this  volume  Major  Rupert  Hughes 
has  said  of  Henry  Fielding  that  "those  who  read  him 
in  his  own  day  took  him  as  a  mere  entertainer;  and 
now  he  is  a  classic!  while  most  of  his  contemptuous 
critics  are  forgotten." 

Most  of  his  contemptuous  critics  are  forgotten!  Did 
Major  Hughes  think  to  startle  me  with  that  sentence? 
Most  men  are  forgotten,  whether  critics  or  novelists, 
kings  or  counsellors,  priests  or  paupers — dust  unto 
dust.  Why  should  your  critic  (whose  claims  upon 
Attention  are,  self-confessedly,  small)  survive  the 
deluge  that  washes  from  the  sands  of  time  the  foot 
prints  left  by  other  men? 

Most  of  his  contemptuous  critics!  There  is  much 
virtue  in  the  phrasing.  Most  of  his  contemptuous 
critics,  but  not  his  most  contemptuous  critic — as  Major 
Hughes  himself  will,  under  my  gentle  suasion,  be  ready 
to  admit.  I  am  second  to  none  in  my  love  of  Henry 
Fielding — indeed,  this  book  of  mine  is  written  all 
around  him — but  I  must  digress  to  speak  of  that  critic 
of  his;  and  this  because  later  critics  sadly  neglect  him; 
and  authors  conclude  that  if  a  critic  be  allusive  or  mis 
taken  he  must  necessarily  be  forgotten ;  whereas  Rich 
ardson.  .  .  . 

214 


OWEN  McMAHON  JOHNSON        215 

I  find  Mr.  James  Branch  Cabell — who  makes  a 
pleasant  mockery  of  those  who  say  (with  Mr.  Harry 
Leon  Wilson)  that  they  cannot  read  Dickens — speak 
ing  of  his  preference  for  "the  grotesqueries  of  Micaw- 
ber  and  Swiveler  and  Winkle  ...  to  a  vain  dream  of 
having  moistened  the  arid  stretches  of  Clarissa  Har- 
lowe's  correspondence  with  the  tear  of  sensibility." 
But  this  preference  (as  he  is  quick  to  point  out)  "does 
not  prove  that  Dickens  is  superior  in  any  way  to 
Richardson" ;  that  one  is  a  humorist  and  the  other  the 
first  of  sentimentalists. 

It  was  Richardson  who  said  that  he  was  unable  to 
fread  further  than  the  first  volume  of  Amelia;  as  for 
Tom  Jones,  as  early  as  the  year  1750,  he  audaciously 
went  on  record  as  prophesying  that  its  run  was  over. 
This  is  no  faint  damning  praise — yet  Tom  Jones  sur 
vives,  as  a  good  book  is  apt  to  do,  praised  or  con 
demned.  Your  critic  may  help  to  introduce  a  book 
to  its  waiting  audience,  or  he  may  advise  those  who 
believe  in  him  what  not  to  read — but  he  can  neither 
make  nor  break  an  author.  I  believe  that  Richardson 
will  be  remembered  long  after  Major  Hughes  and  Mr. 
Owen  Johnson,  let  us  say,  are  forgotten — and  this, 
not  because  he  is  more  entertaining,  but  because  he 
was  an  innovator.  Yet  a  man  may  be  entertaining 
and  become  a  classic:  the  classics  are,  for  the  most 
part,  entertaining.  As  Mr.  Owen  Johnson  is  enter 
taining  and  already  something  of  a  classic. 

When  The  Humming  Bird  appeared  in  1910  (with 
further  adventures  of  Doc  McNooder,  the  Prodigious 
Hickey,  Dick  Stover  and  the  Triumphant  Egghead  in 
The  Varmint  and  The  Tennessee  Shad),  it  became  the 


216   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

fashion  for  those  motoring  between  New  York  and 
Philadelphia,  those  motoring  between  Philadelphia  and 
New  York,  those  motoring  through  Princeton,  to  break 
the  journey  at  Lawrenceville  for  the  purpose  of  visit 
ing  'The  Jigger  Shop"  where  Hungry  Smeed  estab 
lished  the  Great  Pancake  record. 

But  though  Mr.  Johnson  made  his  name  loved  wher 
ever  boys  read,  or  men  think  back  to  see  themselves 
as  never  father  did,  though  he  took  one  of  his  heroes, 
young  Stover,  through  Yale,  he  would  rather  point 
out  that  The  Woman  Gives — for  it  is  a  "broader  field" 
(so  authors  think),  this  turbulent  life  of  twentieth- 
century  New  York  where  The  Salamander  plays  with 
fire,  and  Virtuous  Wives  acts'like  the  very  devil — to  be 
later  made  beautiful  again  by  the  always  lovely  Miss 
Anita  Stewart. 

Mr.  Owen  Johnson  was  born  in  New  York  City, 
August  27,  1878,  the  son  of  Mr.  Robert  Underwood 
Johnson,  a  poet  and  for  so  long  editor  of  the  Century 
Magazine.  Young  Mr.  Johnson  went  to  Lawrence 
ville — 'tis  pointing  out  the  obvious  to  say  so — and 
later  to  Yale,  graduating  in  1901.  He  has  been  three 
times  married,  and  was  the  first  editor  of  the  Law 
renceville  Literary  Magazine,  as  well  as  Chairman  of 
the  Yale  Literary  Magazine  for  the  Class  of  1900.  He 
is  a  member  of  the  National  Institute  of  Arts  and 
Letters. 

In  1901,  but  a  few  months  out  of  college,  he  pub 
lished  Arrows  of  the  Almighty,  of  which  I  have  heard 
good  reports;  and  four  years  later  In  the  Name  of 
Liberty,  now  (so  I  hear)  forgotten.  Later,  having 
read  Balzac,  he  turned  to  the  seamy  side  of  life  in 


OWEN  McMAHON  JOHNSON        217 

New  York's  law  offices  and  pictured  their  infamy,  a 
shame  to  all  the  world,  in  Max  Fargus. 

And  so  the  tale  goes.  He  has  written  two  plays, 
The  Comet  and  A  Comedy  for  Wives,  short  stories 
and  magazine  articles,  and  The  Sixty-first  Second, 
Murder  in  Any  Degree,  Making  Money.  He  should 
be  famous ;  he  may  be  satisfied ;  but  I  am  longing  for 
his  return  to  Lawrenceville. 


CHAPTER  XXXVIII 

JAMES   LANE   ALLEN 

Dr.  Johnson,  who  wrote  The  Lives  of  the  Poets, 
who  referred  to  Fielding's  Amelia  "as  the  most  pleas 
ing  of  all  romances,"  and  to  Fielding  himself  as  a 
waster,  though  on  occasion  an  abusive  critic,  could 
always  distinguish  between  a  man  and  his  work :  a 
good  man  may  write  the  most  tiresome  trash — a  rogue 
as  wretched  as  Villon  a  ballad  of  immortal  worth. 
And  I  do  not  doubt  that  Mr.  Allen,  a  Kentuckian, 
growing  up  when  this  country  was  torn  with  civil 
strife  in  the  state  that  gave  a  president  to  the  North 
and  another  to  the  South,  neither  wholly  of  the  North 
nor  of  the  South,  rising  above  party  faction,  has  all 
the  gracious  fine  manner  and  nobility  of  the  old  school. 
Yet,  though  his  work  has  but  lately  come  into  a  wide 
recognition  of  it  abroad,  I  think  the  best  of  it,  writ 
ten  in  his  first  maturity,  has  become  in  this  country 
a  part  of  the  past,  to  influence  the  elect,  to  be  read  at 
school,  but  never  again  to  be  chattered  over  in  the 
boudoirs,  to  be  a  nine  days'  wonder. 

But  the  critics  and  reviewers  have  always  spoiled 
Mr.  Allen;  so  why  should  I  tell  the  truth  about  him? 
To  those  who  criticized  Pope's  Homer,  Dr.  Johnson 
retorted :  "To  a  thousand  cavils  one  answer  is  suffi 
cient — the  purpose  of  a  writer  is  to  be  read."  And 

218 


JAMES  LANE  ALLEN  219 

Mr.  Allen  has  been  read  far  and  wide  through  this 
easy  land  of  ours;  he  has  a  place  in  our  literary  his 
tory. 

But  I  feel  myself  out  of  sympathy  with  him,  and 
for  this  reason  (with  small  success)  have  tried  to  per 
suade  Mr.  Hamlin  Garland  to  explain  him  away. 
"With  regard  to  Allen,"  he  replied,  "I  am  less  certain, 
although  I  know  him  and  like  him  and  value  his  work. 
He  is  to  be  reckoned  with  in  the  local  color'  school. 
His  stories  of  Kentucky  are  vital  parts  of  the  Southern 
development.  He  is  a  stately,  somewhat  ornate  writer, 
always  the  fine  professor,  thoughtful,  careful  and  high- 
minded.  He  lacks  humor,  the  marvellous  corrective 
insight  which  is  in  Howells,  but  he  is  a  gallant  figure 
never-the-less.  Of  late  his  health  has  been  very  poor 
and  we  see  almost  nothing  of  him.  This  seems  to  me 
a  pity  for  he  is  a  scholarly  and  charming  figure." 

"A  historical  novelist  worthy  to  rank  with  Nathaniel 
Hawthorne,"  Mr.  James  Lane  Allen  has  been  called; 
and  it  has  even  been  hinted  that  "the  remarkable  suc 
cess  which  he  achieved  in  literature  was  due  to  the 
fact  that  he  was  born  a  seventh  child."  Of  late  years, 
however,  the  general  cry  has  been  that  he  no  longer 
writes  as  he  used  to — and  that  sometimes  means  that 
he  never  did.  Complaints  are  heard  on  all  sides.  It 
is  well  to  remember  thai  Mr.  Allen  was  born  (near 
Lexington,  Kentucky)  seventy  years  ago — and  that 
"youth's  a  staff  will  not  endure."  But  .  .  . 

"Never,"  Mr.  Hamilton  Wright  Mabie  once  said, 
"never  did  pioneers  carry  into  a  new  country  a  finer 
blending  of  the  daring  which  moves  the  frontier 
farther  from  the  old  centers,  and  the  chivalry  of 


220   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

romance  for  women  and  idealization  of  emotion  and 
experience,  than  went  into  the  fertile  and  beautiful 
Kentucky  country  in  the  days  which  followed  Boone's 
adventurous  career,  and  produced  the  types  of  char 
acter  which  appear  in  James  Lane  Allen's  The  Choir 
Invisible.  The  Blue  Grass  country  found  in  him  a 
lover  who  was  also  an  artist"  (it  is  to  be  remarked, 
passing,  that  he  now  lives  in  New  York)  "and  the 
background  of  his  stories  is  sketched  with  exquisite 
skill.  The  Kentucky  Cardinal,  Aftermath,  and  the 
stories  in  Flute  and  Violin  have  not  been  surpassed  in 
beauty  of  diction  in  our  fiction.  If  one  might  venture 
to  predict  long  life  for  any  contemporary  writing,  he 
would  not  hesitate  to  put  the  short  stories  of  these  two 
Southern  writers  (Mr.  Allen  and  Mr.  Thomas  Nelson 
Page)  among  American  classics." 

But  when  a  man  becomes  a  classic,  he  ceases  to  be 
read — he  must  be  studied.  This  is  what  (to  the  con 
sternation  of  all  those  who  love  grease  paint)  has  hap 
pened  to  Ibsen — I  would  beg  a  reprieve  for  Mr.  Allen, 
not  simply  because  "The  Choir  Invisible  shows  the 
noble  love  of  a  married  woman  for  a  man  who  is  not 
her  husband,"  but  because  of  the  portrait  of  the  horse- 
breeder  in  The  Doctor's  Christmas  Eve  and  for  the 
sake  of  those  who  have  not  yet  read  The  Kentucky 
Cardinal  .  .  .  foot-notes  would  mar  the  rhythm  of 
the  prose. 

Mr.  Allen  can  number  among  his  paternal  ancestors 
some  of  the  first  settlers  of  Virginia.  One  of  these 
ancestors,  Richard  Allen,  moved  to  Kentucky,  where 
he  lived  the  easy,  hospitable  life  of  a  country  gentle 
man.  Mr.  Allen's  mother  was  a  descendant  of  the 


JAMES  LANE  ALLEN  221 

Brooks  family  and  of  Pennsylvania  Scotch-Irish  folk. 
A  native  of  Mississippi,  a  lover  of  nature  and  of  lit 
erature,  she  inspired  in  her  son  a  curiosity  concerning 
the  old  romances  of  poetry. 

Although  but  twelve  years  old,  Mr.  Allen  saw  the 
horror  and  the  suffering  brought  by  the  Civil  War  to 
the  people  of  the  South.  The  year  before  his  father 
had  lost  his  fortune;  and  in  the  general  havoc,  Mr. 
Allen  received  but  little  formal  education,  tutoring 
under  his  mother  at  home.  Later,  however,  he  at 
tended  the  Transylvania  University  at  Lexington, 
graduating  in  1872,  and  receiving  the  A.M.  degree  in 

1875- 

A  little  before  this  his  father  had  died,  and  Mr. 
Allen  (to  meet  expenses)  spent  a  year  as  master  of  a 
country  school,  walking  six  miles  to  and  from  his 
work.  For  two  years  he  taught  in  Missouri  and  then 
came  back  to  Kentucky  as  a  private  tutor.  He  was 
called  to  Transylvania  University,  and  two  years  later 
Bethany  College,  in  West  Virginia,  offered  him  the 
chair  of  Latin  and  higher  English.  For  a  time  he 
planned  going  to  Germany,  but  gave  up  the  idea,  and, 
while  doing  graduate  work  at  Johns  Hopkins,  about 
decided  to  become  a  doctor  of  medicine.  But  his  lik 
ing  for  literature  led  him  to  take  up  writing;  and  in 
1884  he  moved  to  New  York,  arriving  there  unknown 
and  with  no  letters  of  introduction:  "he  took  up  his 
abode  in  a  garret  and  started  out  in  a  very  humble 
way" — sending  letters  to  the  New  York  Evening  Post, 
poems  to  Harper's  and  the  Atlantic  Monthly,  essays  to 
the  Critic  and  the  Forum.  It  was  a  review  of  the  late 
Henry  James'  Portrait  of  a  Lady  that  first  attracted 


222   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

attention — and  soon  there  was  a  strong  demand  for 
his  work.  He  then  moved  to  Cincinnati,  and  later  to 
Washington,  and  back  to  New  York. 

His  latest  volume,  a  series  of  fictitious  letters,  Em 
blems  of  Fidelity,  is  (says  the  New  York  Sun)  "bright 
and  interesting — you  will  enjoy  reading  it." 


CHAPTER  XXXIX 

SINCLAIR  LEWIS 

"We  only  refer  to  this  unpleasant  compilation  of 
cool  impudence  and  effrontery  to  warn  our  readers 
against  it,"  said  the  Dundee  Advertiser,  reviewing  Dr. 
Havelock  Ellis'  The  New  Spirit  early  in  the  Eighteen- 
Nineties.  But  long  before  I  ever  heard  of  the  Dundee 
Advertiser  Dr.  Havelock  Ellis  had  become,  in  some 
sort,  a  literary  godfather  to  me.  Be  warned  in  time ; 
The  New  Spirit,  though  vastly  more  thoughtful,  deal 
ing  (as  it  does)  with  men  of  prime  importance — 
Diderot,  Heine,  Whitman,  Tolstoy  and  Ibsen — is  still, 
in  many  ways,  an  introduction  to  this  little  book  of 
mine.  Having  been  to  school  to  Dr.  Ellis,  Mr.  Shaw, 
James  McNeill  Whistler  and  the  inimitable  Monsieur 
France,  I  am  (probably)  as  unpleasantly  impudent  as 
the  gayest  of  my  predecessors. 

Yet  am  I  anxious  to  be  of  service.  From  our  earliest 
days,  as  you  know,  we  look  out  into  the  world  with 
wide-eyed  amazement,  trying  to  discover  for  ourselves 
some  answer  to  the  riddle  of  existence.  The  true 
significance  of  life,  which  is  eternal,  must  of  necessity 
evade  our  question ;  and  yet,  instinctively,  we  spend  a 
great  part  of  our  time  searching  and  probing  beneath 
the  surface  of  things  that  we  may  learn  of  the  spirit. 
"The  pulse  of  life  runs  fast,"  says  Dr.  Ellis.  With 

223 


224   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

trembling  fingers  we  attempt  to  determine  and  record, 
as  best  we  may,  its  various  rhythms. 

Upon  the  stage,  and  in  the  stalls  quietly  watching 
the  drama  of  our  day,  a  vast  and  motley  crew  are 
gathered.  To  each  his  own  interpretation  of  the  play. 
I  would  not,  if  I  could,  impose  my  own  conclusions 
upon  any  other.  "Conrad,"  Hugh  Walpole  has  said, 
"is  of  the  firm  and  resolute  conviction  that  life  is  too 
strong,  too  clever  and  too  remorseless  for  the  sons  of 
men."  My  neighbor  is  of  the  opinion  that  it  is  too 
easy;  men  and  women  for  whom  he  has  the  utmost 
contempt  succeed  beyond  the  hopes  of  the  most  precise. 
The  moral  is  what  you  will.  For  myself  I  confess 
that  I  have  as  yet  heard  of  no  moral:  Life  is  no  fable 
expounded  by  ^Esop.  And  "learning  from  experi 
ence"  means  nothing  to  me;  one  merely  learns  about 
one's  self  and,  in  the  brief  span  of  "three-score  and 
ten,"  very  little  about  life. 

And  that  is  why  it  is  expedient,  now  and  again,  to 
remind  the  reader  that,  failing  the  resolution  to  keep 
silent,  your  author  is  merely  talking  about  himself  and 
not,  in  any  real  sense,  concerning  humanity;  for  you 
cannot  generalize  to  any  purpose  concerning  mankind 
from  the  particular  fancy  of  a  momentary  mood ;  you 
cannot  speak  for  your  fellow  be  you  ever  so  intimate 
with  his  life  and  work. 

For  this  reason  I  have,  so  far  as  is  practicable, 
allowed  my  novelists  to  tell  of  themselves,  their  ways 
of  work  and  play,  in  their  own  words.  And  what  they 
have  to  say  is  of  value  because  "a  large  part  of  one's 
investigations  into  the  spirit  of  one's  time,"  as  Dr. 
Ellis  has  pointed  out,  "must  be  made  through  the 


SINCLAIR  LEWIS  225 

medium  of  literary  personalities.  ...  It  is  the  inti 
mate  thought  and  secret  emotions  of  such  men  that 
become  the  common  property  of  after  generations. 
Whenever  a  great  literary  personality  comes  before 
us,  it  is  our  business  to  divine  its  fundamental  in 
stincts." 

Few  attain  greatness,  and  yet  .  .  . 

"Have  you  thought  of  Sinclair  Lewis?"  Mr.  Herge- 
sheimer  asked  me,  January  13,  1919.  "The  Job  is 
worth  consideration;  O'Brien  is  reprinting  one  of  his 
stories  in  the  yearly  anthology." 

In  1914  Mr.  Lewis  published  his  first  novel,  Our 
Mr.  Wrenn;  to  be  followed  by  The  Trail  qf  the  Hawk, 
1915.  He  is  one  of  those  who  write,  with  some  regu 
larity,  for  the  Saturday  Evening  Post — and  they  are, 
apparently,  the  most  popular  of  those  who  write  at  all. 
And  he  has,  at  intervals,  contributed  short  stories  to 
the  Century,  Everybody's,  and  the  Metropolitan.  It 
was  not,  however,  until  the  publication  of  The  Job 
in  1917  that  he  came  into  his  own,  really  made  his 
mark. 

"I  was  born,"  he  writes  me,  "February  7,  1885,  in 
a  Minnesota  village,  Sauk  Center,  a  genuine  prairie 
town,  ringed  round  with  wheat  fields  broken  by  slew 
and  oak-rimmed  lakes,  with  the  autumn  flight  of  ducks 
from  Canada  as  its  most  exotic  feature.  My  boy 
hood  was  alarmingly  normal,  midwestern,  American — 
my  father  the  prosperous  pioneer  doctor  whose  diver 
sions  were  hunting  and  travel;  my  school  the  public 
school,  with  no  peculiarly  inspired  teachers ;  my  sports, 
aside  from  huge  amounts  of  totally  unsystematized 
reading  of  everything  from  dime  novels  and  Ned  books 


226   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

and  casual  sentimental  novels  to  translations  of  Homer, 
were  the  typical  occupations  of  such  a  boy:  swimming 
in  the  creek,  hunting  rabbits,  playing  pom-pom-pull- 
away  under  the  arc  light  in  the  evening.  There  was 
rnot  much  work — a  few  evening  chores,  of  the  wood- 
box  filling  sort. 

"I  don't  know  how  I  got  the  inspiration  to  go  East 
and  become  irregular,  abnormal,  happy,  and  otherwise 
literary.  But  I  went  to  Yale;  then  for  eight  years — 
1907  to  1915 — was  a  literary  jack  of  all  trades;  news 
paper  reporter  (on  the  New  Haven  Courier  and 
Journal,  San  Francisco  Bulletin,  and  for  the  Associ 
ated  Press),  magazine  editor  (Transatlantic  Tales, 
Volta  Review,  Adventure,  Publishers9  Newspaper 
Syndicate),  manuscript  reader  for  F.  A.  Stokes  Co. 
and  George  H.  Doran  Co. 

"I  did  get  in  a  few  savingly  unliterary  hikes,  how 
ever.  During  college  I  made  two  cattleboat  trips  to 
England ;  on  one  of  them  landed  in  England  with  only 
fifteen  cents,  and  stayed  alive  by  borrowing  three 
dollars  from  a  fellow  cattleman,  which  lasted  till  the 
boat  returned.  Again  I  wandered  down  to  Panama, 
going  steerage,  returning  stowaway,  and  in  between 
failing  to  get  a  job  on  the  Panama  railroad.  A  year 
and  a  half  I  spent  in  California,  part  of  it  reporting, 
part  trying  (vainly)  to  'free  lance/  sharing  a  bunga 
low  at  Carmel  with  William  Rose  Benet.  And  once 
Allan  Updegraff  and  I  shared  miserable  rooms  on 
the  East  Side  of  New  York. 

"Now,  for  three  years  of  'free  lancing'  as  a  rather 
perilously  respectable  citizen,  with  a  wife  and  baby,  I 
have  combined  wandering  with  being  settled  down! 


SINCLAIR  LEWIS  227 

In  Minneapolis,  St.  Paul,  New  York,  California,  Cape 
Cod,  Florida,  we  rent  furnished  houses,  and  regard 
the  curious  ways  of  new  people  without  sacrificing 
bathtubs — which  are,  of  course,  esthetically  and  eco 
nomically,  the  symbols  of  civilization. 

"As  to  music  and  pictures,  I  am  altogether  naive" 
(he  is,  you  must  remember,  answering  my  now  long 
since  forgotten  questions  concerning  life  and  litera 
ture).  "In  authors  my  preferences  are:  H.  G.  Wells, 
Compton  Mackenzie,  Joseph  Hergesheimer,  George 
Moore,  Joseph  Conrad,  Vachel  Lindsay,  Edgar  Lee 
Masters.  I  am,  I  suppose,  to  be  technical,  a  disco- 
ordinated  radical  in  politics.  For  sport  I  drive  a  motor 
car — a  thousand  miles  at  a  whack — and  work." 


CHAPTER  XL 

HERMANN  HAGEDORN,  JR. 

Mr.  Hagedorn  (born  on  July  18,  1882)  is  the  author 
of  two  novels,  Faces  in  the  Dawn  and  Barbara  Picks 
a  Husband,  a  man  of  wit  and  learning,  with  (for  all 
his  interest  in  affairs  of  state)  the  most  inconsequential 
view  of  life  if  one  should  judge  by  Barbara  Picks  a 
Husband.  This  is  the  curse  of  writing  novels:  you 
may  swear,  in  a  letter  to  some  much-abused  critic,  that 
you  stand  on  tip-toe  to  watch  the  great  world  pass  in 
all  the  trappings  of  state,  that  you  hear  the  echo  of 
progression  marching  outside  the  window  of  your 
room — but  you  mustn't  tell  fairy-tales  in  all  serious 
ness  of  frivolous  girls  whose  capture  is  matter  to 
engage  the  sanest,  if  you  would  be  believed — you 
mustn't  spin  your  yarn  too  fine  if  you  would  have  us 
pass  it  as  woof  of  fate  and  time,  yourself  no  idle 
apprentice  weaving  magic  in  the  sun. 

But  Mr.  Hagedorn  is  quite  right:  The  Great  Maze 
and  The  Heart  of  Youth  are  well  worth  reading — and 
so  is  his  contribution  to  my  book;  I  commend  it  to 
your  attention : — 

I  was  born  on  Staten  Island.  I  don't  know  where. 
I  have  been  told  that  there  were  lots  of  mosquitoes 
roundabout  and  I  have  seen  a  picture  of  the  house, 
taken  in  the  manner  of  the  eighties,  with  people  stand- 

228 


HERMANN  HAGEDORN,  JR.  229 

ing  at  every  window  and  at  every  piazza,  post,  or  sit 
ting  in  rockers  or  on  the  porch  steps.  I  have  always 
connected  that  house  with  a  multitude  of  pleasant 
people  in  a  graceful  position  of  attention,  incredibly 
young  looking  people  when  I  considered  how  old  they 
seemed  when  I  began  to  know  them. 

At  the  age  of  three  weeks  or  thereabouts  I  moved  to 
Brooklyn  and  it  was  in  Brooklyn  that  I  first  discovered 
the  terrors  of  school.  I  did  not  like  school  very  much, 
for  my  first  school  was  a  girls'  affair  where  boys  were 
merely  suffered,  and  my  second  was  a  pseudo-military 
academy,  presided  over  by  a  Prussian  martinet  with  a 
scarred  face,  who  wrore  a  flat-topped  derby  and  used 
to  call  on  my  father  Sunday  nights  and  keep  him  up 
until  after  midnight,  to  my  father's  intense  indigna 
tion.  There  were  other  reasons  why  I  did  not  like 
school.  My  way  to  it  lay  through  a  region  where  what 
were  known  as  "micks"  abounded;  and  they  kept  me 
in  a  continual  state  of  terror. 

School  began  to  be  a  delight  when  I  became  sixteen 
and  was  sent  to  the  Hill  School  in  Pottstown,  Pennsyl 
vania.  The  Hill  opened  the  world  of  boys  to  me,  and 
one  or  two  other  worlds,  in  time.  The  principal,  John 
Meigs,  was,  next  to  Theodore  Roosevelt,  the  most 
positive  personality  I  have  ever  known,  a  man  of  deep 
tenderness  and  extraordinary  power,  warm-hearted, 
hot-tempered,  indomitable.  His  wife  was  known  as 
"Mrs.  John" — a  torch  of  a  woman  with  the  ability 
to  take  a  boy's  character  apart  before  his  eyes  to  show 
him  how  it  worked,  and  to  put  it  together  again  and 
hand  it  back  to  him  as  one  would  a  watch — "Now  see 
that  you  don't  let  it  run  down." 


230   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

It  was  at  the  Hill  that  I  felt  the  first  faint  impulse 
to  write.  There  was  a  school  monthly,  the  Record, 
which  seemed  very  important  to  those  of  us  who 
wanted  to  become  editors  of  it,  and  we  all  wrote  a 
great  many  unspeakably  bad  things  for  it.  I  left  the 
Hill  in  1901.  The  first  thing  I  ever  published  in  what 
I  called  a  "real"  magazine — though  it  wasn't — was  a 
sentimental  allegory  in  an  ephemeral  four-by-six 
pamphlet  called  Heart's  Yarns.  I  remember  the  hearts 
all  over  the  white  cover.  I  was  office-boy  in  a  whole 
sale  dry  goods  house  after  that,  an  occupation  I 
loathed ;  then  for  a  few  months  I  attended  a  business 
college  (my  father  objected  to  my  handwriting)  and 
spent  my  time  editing  the  school  magazine.  A  rather 
violent  dose  of  typhoid  span  me  completely  on  my 
base,  and  I  emerged  from  the  hospital  with  a  desire, 
suddenly  developed,  to  write  verse.  My  father  agreed 
with  a  sigh  that  I  did  not  seem  fit  for  business  and 
allowed  me  to  take  a  position  with  the  Reader,  a  lit 
erary  monthly  which  attempted  unsuccessfully  to  com 
pete  with  the  Bookman.  My  salary — ten  dollars  a 
week — seemed  to  me  at  the  time  quite  tremendous.  In 
dry  goods,  I  had  been  getting  four,  with  promise,  after 
a  year,  of  a  dollar  raise. 

The  Reader  did  not  amount  to  much,  but  on  its  staff 
were  a  number  of  men  who  had  come  under  the  in 
fluence  of  Barrett  Wendell,  George  P.  Baker  and  the 
others  of  the  Harvard  group.  They  pointed  out  to 
me  that  I  did  not  know  very  much  and  that  what  I 
needed  was  a  year  or  two  at  college  under  these  men. 
The  idea  seemed  sound.  I  went  to  Harvard  for  a 
year  and  stayed  four.  They  were  quite  wonderful 


HERMANN  HAGEDORN,  JR.  231 

years — years  of  reading  and  endless  writing  and  fel 
lowship  and  discovery.  I  discovered  standards,  I  dis 
covered  people,  I  discovered  the  beauty  and  fascination 
and  terror  and  ruthlessness  of  life.  I  wrote  a  good 
many  verses  and  stories,  which  were  published  in  the 
Harvard  Monthly  and  which  won  some  favor;  and 
ended  my  college  career  in  a  totally  unexpected  blaze 
of  limelight  owing  to  a  class  poem  called  A  Troop 
of  the  Guard,  which  happened  to  catch  the  public. 

I  went  abroad  and  studied,  or  pretended  to  study, 
one  semester  at  Berlin  University;  returned  to  Amer 
ica,  married,  and  settled  down  as  an  instructor  of 
English  and  Comparative  Literature  at  Harvard.  I 
stayed  there  for  two  years,  but  I  was  not  much  of  a 
success  as  a  teacher.  I  was  trying  to  serve  two  mas 
ters,  the  college  and  the  Muse,  with  the  result  that  my 
teaching  was  half-hearted  and  my  writing  academic. 
I  broke  away  and  took  my  family  West.  We  went  to 
Santa  Barbara  and  settled  in  a  gorgeous  spot  over 
looking  the  sea,  intending  to  stay  a  year,  or  forever. 
We  stayed  six  months.  The  place  was  lotus-land.  It 
was  no  place  for  work,  not  for  work  that  meant  some 
thing.  We  returned  East  and  bought  a  farm  in  Con 
necticut.  There  was  nothing  lotus-landy  about  life 
after  that.  We  found  that  living  on  a  farm  nowadays 
is  an  exacting  and  difficult  business.  We  all  learnt 
what  it  meant  to  work;  we  learnt  a  great  many  other 
things;  we  saw  light  on  many  "literary"  misconcep 
tions. 

The  Great  War  hit  me  hard  from  the  start,  for 
brothers  of  mine  were  fighting  in  the  armies  of  Ger 
many.  My  own  neutrality  was  never  such  as  the 


232    THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

President  would  have  approved;  but  what  there  was 
of  it  died  when  the  Lusitania  went  down.  I  hoped 
the  United  States  would  go  to  war  with  Germany  in 
1915.  When  we  did  not,  and  still  remained  neutral 
in  1916,  I  joined  with  three  other  men,  Julian  Street, 
Porter  Emerson  Brown  and  Charles  Hanson  Towne, 
in  starting  the  Vigilantes,  with  the  idea  of  making  it 
a  sort  of  megaphone  through  which  to  preach  national 
duty.  The  war  came  at  last.  The  Vigilantes  did  a 
little  something  in  the  waging  of  the  war  at  home. 

I  wrote  a  number  of  books  in  these  years,  plays, 
poems,  novels,  propaganda  and  one  volume  of  biog 
raphy,  a  Boys'  Life  of  Theodore  Roosevelt.  The  best 
of  these  is  the  one  which  no  one  seems  to  know  any 
thing  about.  It  is  a  narrative  in  blank  verse  called 
The  Great  Maze.  It  is  a  modern  story,  but  the  names 
are  the  names  of  ancient  folk,  Agamemnon  and 
'Clytaemnestra,  yEgisthus  and  Iphigenia,  and  so  every 
body  says,  "The  names  are  old,  so  the  stuff  must  be 
old."  It  is  too  bad. 

You  ask  me  to  write  you  something  that  will  make 
me  'Vivid  and  real"  to  your  readers.  Perhaps  some 
day  I  will,  but  it  will  not  be  in  a  letter  like  this,  but  in 
a  novel,  and  your  readers  won't  know  it  when  I've 
done  it.  Besides,  I  am  not  a  very  important  person 
and  my  "preference  in  salads,"  concerning  which  you 
inquire,  will  make  no  dish  famous.  I  have  "ambi 
tions,"  but  they  are  not  the  sort  of  ambitions  which 
would  be  of  interest  to  the  general  run  of  folk ;  there 
is  nothing  very  splendiferous  about  them.  At  present, 
I  am  very  much  more  interested  in  public  affairs  than 
I  am  in  books,  ancient  or  modern,  my  own  or  any  one's 


HERMANN  HAGEDORN,  JR.  233 

else.  I  may  never  write  another  book;  to  be  a  part, 
even  a  very  small  part,  of  the  drama  which  is  unfold 
ing  itself  from  day  to  day  seems  at  the  moment  of  far 
more  consequence  than  any  book  which  I  am  ever 
likely  to  write.  So,  really,  I  am  out  of  place  among 
"novelists."  For  I  am  just  a  man  at  a  flat-top  desk 
three  hundred  feet  above  the  ground,  staring  day  after 
day  at  a  huge  map  of  the  United  States  and  wondering 
how  Charlie  Jones  of  Sipes  Springs  can  be  persuaded 
to  mould  himself  and  his  government  "a  little  nearer 
to  the  heart's  desire"  of  Washington  and  Lincoln  and 
Roosevelt.  Some  of  my  friends  intimate  that  I  am  a 
lost  soul.  I  let  it  go  at  that. 


CHAPTER  XLI 

SHERWOOD  ANDERSON 

With  Windy  McPherson's  Son  and  Marching  Men, 
Mr.  Sherwood  Anderson  has  made  a  name  for  him 
self  among  Americans,  for  there  is  style  and  sincerity, 
action  and  thought  in  his  books.  They  were  not  writ 
ten  in  haste,  but  patiently  and  earnestly  out  of  a  wide 
experience — real  experience  as  Mr.  Anderson's  auto 
biography  shows : 

"I  was  born  in  1876  of  Scotch-Irish  parents,  in  a 
little  village  in  Ohio.  My  mother  was  tall  and  gaunt 
and  silent,  and  after  giving  birth  to  seven  children — 
all  excepting  one  now  living — died  of  over-work  be 
fore  reaching  the  age  of  forty.  By  an  odd  coincidence, 
the  portrait  of  myself  painted  by  Bill  Hollandsworth, 
that  I  am  using  in  publicity,  is  a  remarkably  good 
portrait  of  my  mother.  This  young  artist  has  been 
able  to  reach  down  through  the  rather  commonplace 
looking,  fairly  prosperous  business  man  I  am,  and  get 
a  hold  of  what  there  is  in  me  of  this  gaunt  woman 
whose  blood  is  in  my  veins.  The  portrait  I  am  sure 
does  not  look  much  like  me  but  the  artist  has  caught 
in  it  the  very  spirit  of  my  mother. 

"In  our  family  there  were  five  boys  and  two  girls. 
A  girl  died,  and  when  my  mother  died  also,  my  sister, 

234 


SHERWOOD  ANDERSON  235 

who  was  a  few  years  older  than  myself,  became  the 
housekeeper  in  our  house. 

"It  was  thin  housekeeping.  My  father,  a  journey 
man  harness-maker  of  the  old  days,  was  a  lovable, 
improvident  fellow,  inclined  to  stretch  the  truth  in 
statement,  loving  to  swagger  before  his  fellow  towns 
men,  not  averse  to  losing  an  occasional  battle  with 
the  demon  rum — on  the  whole,  a  dear,  lovable,  color 
ful,  no  account,  who  should  have  been  a  novelist  him 
self. 

"Lord,  but  we  were  poor — too  poor.  An  incident 
of  that  time  will  illustrate  how  poor  we  were. 

"In  our  village  the  boys  celebrated  Hallowe'en  by 
.creeping  along  the  street  in  the  darkness  and  throwing 
heads  of  cabbages  against  the  doors  of  the  houses.  If 
no  one  paid  any  attention  to  them,  they  went  on  their 
way,  but  if  an  irate  housekeeper  came  out  of  the  house 
and  ran  after  them,  they  returned  again  and  again  to 
the  charge. 

"My  mother,  knowing  this,  took  advantage  of  it. 
You  get  a  sense  of  her  tall,  gaunt  figure  crouching  in 
the  darkness  waiting  for  the  boys.  When  they  had 
thrown  the  cabbages,  she  pursued  them.  The  game 
was  sometimes  kept  up  for  hours  and  my  mother 
acquired  by  this  method  twenty-five  or  thirty  cabbages 
on  which  we  were  fed  for  the  next  month. 

"All  of  this,  as  you  may  suppose,  gave  me  an  almost 
overweening  respect  for  cash.  As  early  as  I  can 
remember,  I  was  on  the  streets  of  our  town,  sweeping 
out  stores,  mowing  the  lawns  before  houses,  selling 
newspapers,  taking  care  of  horses  belonging  to  families 
where  there  were  no  men,  selling  pop-corn  and  peanuts 


236   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

to  the  crowds  on  Saturday  afternoon — perpetually 
busy.  I  became  known  in  the  town  as  'Jobby'  Ander 
son,  because  of  my  keenness  for  any  job  that  presented 
itself.  As  the'result  of  this  method,  I  soon  had  money 
jingling  in  my  pocket,  although  I  had  no  time  to  go  to 
school.  What  education  I  got  was  picked  up  in  the 
bar  rooms,  the  stores,  and  on  the  street,  and  by  the 
grace  of  certain  lovable  characters  in  our  place  who 
took  me  in  hand,  loaned  me  books,  and  talked  to  me 
through  the  evening  about  the  old  poets  and  story 
tellers. 

"When  I  was  sixteen  or  seventeen  years  old,  I  came 
to  the  city  of  Chicago  and  there  made  the  most  serious 
mistake  of  my  life.  For  four  or  five  years  I  worked 
as  a  common  laborer  and  got  myself  caught  in  that 
vicious  circle  of  things  where  a  man  cannot  swagger 
before  his  fellows,  is  too  tired  to  think,  and  too  piti 
fully  ashamed  of  his  appearance  to  push  out  into  the 
world. 

"The  Spanish  War  saved  me  from  this.  I  enlisted, 
frankly  not  through  patriotism — but  in  order  to  get 
out  of  my  situation.  To  my  amazement,  when  I  went 
home  to  my  home  town  to  become  a  soldier,  I  was 
greeted  as  a  hero — one  who  had  given  up  a  lucrative 
position  in  the  city  in  order  to  fight  for  his  country. 
My  natural  shrewdness  led  me  to  take  advantage  of 
this  situation,  and  I  enjoyed  it  thoroughly. 

"The  rest  of  my  story  is  a  very  simple  one.  When 
I  came  back  from  the  war,  I  got  into  the  advertising 
business,  and  have  been  a  writer  of  advertising  ever 
since  excepting  for  a  few  years  when  I  attempted  to 
become  a  manufacturer  and  made  a  failure  of  it.  The 


SHERWOOD  ANDERSON 


237 


advertising  business  is  one  that  lends  itself  peculiarly 
to  what  I  wanted  to  do  in  life.  I  do  not  understand 
why  more  novelists  do  not  go  into  it.  It  is  all  quite 
simple.  You  are  to  write  advertisements  for  one  who 
puts  tomatoes  in  cans.  You  imagine  yourself  a  canner 
of  tomatoes.  You  become  enthusiastic  about  the  toma 
to.  You  are  an  actor  given  a  role  to  play  and  you 
play  it. 

'There  is  an  idea  abroad  that  to  do  this  one  must 
become  in  fact  a  canner  of  tomatoes,  but  it  is  as  absurd 
to  say  this  as  to  say  that  the  actor  who  plays  King 
Lear  must  necessarily  go  about  choking  women  to 
death. 

"The  impulse  that  led  me  to  write  novels  was  the 
impulse  for  my  own  salvation.  I  did  not  want  to 
become  in  reality  the  canner  of  tomatoes.  There  was 
in  me  a  good  deal  of  my  father's  swagger  and  pre 
tentiousness.  At  the  time  I  wrote  my  first  novel  I  was 
just  failing  in  my  manufacturing  adventure,  and  losing 
a  good  deal  of  money  for  my  personal  friends.  I  wor 
ried  about  the  matter.  I  found  myself  in  the  pitiful 
position  of  so  many  business  men  and  thought  it  not, 
unlikely  that  at  forty  I  would  be  an  irritable,  nervous 
wreck,  spending  my  time  protesting  against  the  unfair 
ness  of  life. 

"One  day  I  sat  down  and  began  to  write  a  novel.  I 
liked  it.  To  my  amazement,  I  found  that  on  paper  I 
was  entirely  honest  and  sincere — a  really  likable,  clear 
headed  decent  fellow.  At  once,  I  knew  that  I  would 
write  novels  the  rest  of  my  life,  and  I  certainly  shall. 

"In  the  beginning  it  was  my  dream  that  I  would 
write  during  my  life  perhaps  ten  or  fifteen  novels 


238  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

without  publishing  any  of  them.  I  do  not  want  to  be 
a  novelist,  although  I  want  to  write  novels.  I  do  not 
want  a  myth  built  up  about  me.  It  struck  me  as  a  bully 
adventure  to  spend  my  life  writing  novels  and  have 
them  published  only  after  my  death. 

"I  have  changed  my  mind  about  this  only  because 
it  may  be  possible  that  my  novels  will  make  me  some 
money  and  I  want  the  money. 

"To  be  sure,  there  is  an  impulse  back  of  my  novel 
writing.  It  is,  however,  an  impulse  that  one  cannot 
discuss.  To  talk  of  it  would  be  like  discussing  before 
casual  acquaintances  the  character  of  the  woman  one 
loves." 


CHAPTER  XLII 

GEORGE  BARR  MCCUTCHEON 

There  are  novelists  and  novelists — the  severer  art 
ists:  Turgenieff,  Meredith,  Flaubert;  and  those  who 
are  primarily  story-tellers:  Marion  Crawford,  Scott, 
the  wanton  Gyp.  They  are  poles  apart;  and  yet  they 
differ  from  Mr.  Kipling's  East  and  West  in  that  the 
twain  do  meet. 

After  a  luncheon,  some  ten  or  twelve  years  ago, 
given  at  the  Savage  Club  in  London  to  Mr.  McCutch- 
eon  by  Mr.  Clement  K.  Shorter,  editor  of  the  Sphere 
and  author  of  Charlotte  Bronte  and  Her  Circle,  Mr. 
Thomas  Hardy  took  Mr.  McCutcheon  bus-riding  to 
view  some  paintings  at  the  Guildhall,  and  then,  since 
Mr.  McCutcheon's  afternoon  was  free,  by  another  bus 
out  to  Hampstead.  Great  men  are  simple  and  un 
affected  in  their  simplicity — and  lesser  men,  recogniz 
ing  their  greatness,  look  back  with  proud  pleasure  on 
every  chance  encounter  with  them.  So  one  remembers 
passing  Lincoln  on  the  street — one  who  may  possibly 
forget  the  boy  with  whom  he  fought  at  school.  And 
there  is  much  of  this  simplicity  (learned  of  the  great, 
I  doubt  not)  in  Mr.  McCutcheon,  a  very  successful 
maker  of  novels. 

Mr.  McCutcheon  was  born,  July  26,  1866,  on  a  farm 
near  Lafayette,  in  Tippecanoe  County,  Indiana.  His 

239 


240  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

father  was  a  drover,  born  in  Kentucky,  of  Scotch 
descent,  and  of  native  Virginia  stock.  His  mother, 
though  born  in  Ohio  and  raised  on  an  Indiana  farm, 
near  the  Wabash,  was  Pennsylvania  Dutch.  Certain 
of  Mr.  McCutcheon's  earliest  memories  center  about 
the  cattle,  sheep,  hogs,  bought  up  in  the  country  round 
about  and  waiting  shipment  in  his  father's  fields.  But 
at  about  ten  he  moved  with  the  family  to  Lafayette,  a 
city  of  thirty  thousand,  older  than  Chicago,  where  his 
father  went  into  the  banking  and  brokerage  business, 
was  elected  sheriff,  serving  four  years,  and  died  as 
county  treasurer — a  Democrat  in  a  three-to-one  Re 
publican  district.  Mr.  McCutcheon  comes  of  a  family 
used  to  success.  His  sister,  Mrs.  Raleigh,  who  began 
a  few  years  ago  making  the  Good  Fairy  statuettes,  now 
runs  a  huge  factory  manufacturing  the  Raleigh  dolls. 
His  brother  Ben  heads  the  Liberty  Loan  Publicity  for 
Chicago.  And  John  T.  is  one  of  the  great  war  corre 
spondents,  a  lion-hunter,  and  perhaps  the  ablest  of 
newspaper  cartoonists. 

Mr.  McCutcheon  was  educated  at  Purdue  Uni 
versity.  In  the  summer  of  1882,  between  his  freshman 
and  sophomore  years,  he  joined  C.  P.  Hormig's 
Comedy  Company,  playing  juvenile  leads  under  the 
name  of  George  M.  Clifford.  He  had  been  born  stage- 
struck.  In  earliest  youth  he  had  written  plays  more 
terrible  than  Penrod's,  meaningless  plays  ranting 
heroics.  But  he  walked  and  beat  his  way  home,  with 
no  money,  from  the  summer  of  tent-storming  (for  they 
played  under  canvas)  and  so  was  partially  cured — the 
staging  of  Graustark,  his  first  novel,  completing  the 
process. 


GEORGE  BARR  McCUTCHEON    241 

Graustark,  the  title  a  happy  accident — as  Keats 
knew,  the  "magic  hand  of  chance"  points  towards  that 
fairy  world  where  romance  waits — was  written  be 
tween  December  and  March,  1898-9,  while  Mr.  Mc- 
Cutcheon  was.  city  editor  of  the  Lafayette  Courier  and 
sold  for  $500.00  ...  a  bargain  that  might  have 
proved  tragical  had  no  successor  to  that  mythical 
sword-slashing  tale  proved  a  success.  But  The  Sher- 
rods,  which  deals  with  Indiana  farmer-folk  and  is 
Mr.  McCutcheon's  favorite  among  his  books,  was  well 
received  .  .  .  and  Nedra  and  The  Day  of  the  Dog, 
which  had  its  beginnings  in  a  dream. 

Then  came  Brewster's  Millions.  Mr.  McCutcheon, 
no  longer  a  newspaper  man,  was  riding  in  a  street  car 
with  his  brother  Ben  when  they  passed  a  row  of  bill 
boards,  advertising  I  forget  what.  "They  are  spending 
millions,"  said  Ben.  And  they  fell  to  talking  about  it. 
"And  supposing  you  had  a  million,  how  would  you 
spend  it?"  And  the  plot  of  the  novel  presented  itself. 
But  the  spending— not  investing  nor  dissipating — of 
the  million  was  not  so  easy.  However,  the  book — 
extremely  clever — was  written  and  turned  over  to 
Stone  and  brought  out  over  the  name  of  Richard 
Greaves,  because  Dodd,  Mead  were  at  the  time  pub 
lishing  another  of  Mr.  McCutcheon's  tales  and  because 
Mr.  McCutcheon  did  not  figure  his  name  worth  a  great 
deal — had,  in  fact,  bet  Mr.  Stone  a  hundred  dollars 
that  Greaves  was  as  good  a  name  as  McCutcheon.  He 
was  proved  right  in  the  event,  for  Brewster's  Millions 
outsold  his  other  book. 

Then  there  were  the  later  Graustarks — Beverly  and 


242   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

the  rest.  And  The  Rose  and  the  Ring,  in  1910,  a 
circus  story  preparatory  to  which  Mr.  McCutcheon 
joined  Wallace's  Circus,  travelling  as  the  guest  of  the 
manager,  coming  to  admire  and  immensely  like  the 
circus  people.  And  The  Hollow  of  Her  Hand,  which 
tells  of  a  man  of  family  murdered  in  a  roadhouse  by 
a  girl  whom  he  thought  to  seduce,  of  his  wife  who 
hurries  out  there  when  notified  and  meets  up  with  the 
girl  wandering  on  the  road,  brings  her  home,  and  in 
vengeance  on  the  man  who  had  wronged  them  both, 
forces  his  family  to — a  readable  book.  And  Mr.  Bin- 
gle,  an  elderly  bank  clerk,  and  his  wife,  who  suddenly 
come  into  money  and  every  year  (since  they  are 
childless)  adopt  a  boy  or  girl,  who  lose  their  money 
when  other  heirs  prove  previous  claims,  whose  children 

are  taken  away  by  humane  societies,  and  who 

Mr.  McCutcheon  is  primarily  a  story-teller,  influ 
enced  (as  he  confesses)  by  Dickens,  a  collector  of 
first-editions,  one  who  delights  in  Corot  and  Ranger, 
and  is  not  deep  in  any  problems  that  could  not  interest 
those  who  seek  a  new  and  more  romantic  world  in 
their  reading. 

MR.  McCuTCHEON's  WORKS  INCLUDE: 

Graustark,  Castle  Craneycrow,  The  Sherrods,  Brew- 
ster's  Millions,  The  Day  of  the  Dog,  Beverly  of  Grau- 
stark,  Nedra,  Purple  Parasol,  Cowardice  Court,  Jane 
Cable,  The  Flyers,  The  Daughter  of  Anderson  Crow, 
The  Husbands  of  Edith,  The  Man  from  Brodney's, 
The  Alternative,  Truxton  King,  The  Butterfly  Man, 
The  Rose  in  the  Ring,  What's-His-Name,  Many  Mid- 


GEORGE  BARR  McCUTCHEON    243 

thorne,  Her  Weight  in  Gold,  The  Hollow  of  Her 
Hand,  A  Fool  and  His  Money,  Black  Is  White,  The 
Price  of  Graustark,  Mr.  Single,  From  the  House  Tops, 
The  Light  That  Lies,  Green  Fancy. 


CHAPTER  XLIII 

ZANE  GREY 

Of  the  so-called  "popular'*  American  novelists,  none 
holds  a  higher  place  than  Zane  Grey.  As  hunter, 
fisherman  and  explorer,  his  writings  first  began  to 
attract  notice  in  Field  and  Stream  and  with  his  Roping 
Lions  in  the  Grand  Canyon,  which  first  appeared  in 
this  periodical  during  1908,  he  established  himself  as 
one  of  the  foremost  descriptive  writers  in  this  country 
— for  Zane  Grey  possesses  an  ability  to  write  descrip 
tion  that  is  crowned  with  exciting  incident.  His  stories 
are  of  horsemen,  plainsmen,  and  their  like. 

Mr.  Warren  H.  Miller,  editor  of  Field  and  Stream, 
contributes  the  following  interesting  notes  on  Zane 
Grey: 

"After  a  few  contributions  on  black  bass  angling  on 
the  Delaware,  which  was  at  that  time  one  of  Grey's 
amusements,  he  came  to  us  with  the  serial,  Down  an 
Unknown  Jungle  River,  a  breathless  narrative  of  an 
exploring  trip  down  a  Mexican  river  that  Zane  Grey 
had  once  noted  from  the  train  in  one  of  his  travels. 
Where  it  led  or  whether  it  was  even  navigable  no  one 
knew,  but  the  fact  that  it  swept  downward  towards 
the  sea  through  a  trackless  mountainous  Mexican, 
jungle  was  enough  for  Zane  Grey — he  would  go  down 
it  forthwith!  And  it  gave  him  the  material  for  a 

244 


ZANE  GREY  245 

wonderful  story;  jaguar,  puma,  deer  and  peccary 
hunting,  fishing  where  no  fish  caught  turned  out  to  be 
anything  like  he  had  ever  seen  before;  wildfowl  shoot 
ing  of  new  and  strange  birds.  Added  to  this  the  haz 
ards  of  the  river,  working  the  boat  down  over  series 
of  ledges  against  which  there  would  be  no  turning 
back,  getting  lost  where  the  river  wound  under  almost 
subterranean  tropical  jungles,  adventures  with  poison 
ous  snakes  of  every  kind,  and,  finally  fighting  tropical 
fever  in  his  small  expeditionary  force — such  was  the 
thrilling  tale  that  made  up  the  chapters  of  Down  an 
Unknown  Jungle  River. 

"Followed  more  contributions  on  fishing,  particu 
larly  the  great  game  fish  of  the  Atlantic  coast,  the 
tuna,  of  which  Zane  Grey  landed  one  large  enough  to 
take  a  prize  in  our  National  Fishing  Contest,  and  then 
he  came  to  us  with  a  new  serial.  It  was  not  surprising 
that  a  man  who  could  write  like  Zane  Grey  would  soon 
turn  his  hand  to  fiction,  and  the  story  he  brought  us 
was  just  the  kind  that  Field  and  Stream  men  want 
when  they  consent  to  read  an  outdoor  novel — a  western 
story  by  a  man  who  has  been  west  of  Brooklyn,  who 
knows  the  men  and  the  country,  and  writes  so  that 
the  old-timers  recognize  what  he  puts  into  his  story  as 
true  local  color.  Riders  of  the  Purple  Sage  was  the 
name  of  this  serial,  to  our  mind  one  of  the  best  and 
truest  things  he  has  ever  done.  During  1913  that  was 
the  principal  contribution  from  his  pen  that  we  pub 
lished.  About  this  time  Zane  Grey  began  to  incline 
more  and  more  to  the  sport  of  angling  for  the  big  game 
fish  of  tropical  waters.  A  trip  to  Mexico,  again  after 
jaguar,  having  been  cut  short  by  the  revolution  in  that 


246  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

country,  he  landed  at  Long  Key  where  he  was  initiated 
into  the  wonderful  fishing  for  barracoota,  tarpon, 
swordfish,  and  sailfish  that  are  the  principal  game  in 
those  waters.  Soon  our  pages  were  brightened  by  his 
fishing  stories,  told  in  the  same  vivid  style,  and  with 
the  same  ability  to  make  the  reader  see  the  local  sur 
roundings  that  characterized  his  hunting  stories  when 
roping  lions  in  Colorado. 

"Then  followed  a  second  serial,  a  novel  that  always 
appeals  to  our  people,  a  novel  of  the  arid  desert  region 
around  Pinacate.  Desert  Gold  was  the  name  of  the 
romance  staged  in  these  weird  surroundings,  and  again 
Grey  presented  as  true  a  picture  of  the  country  as  one 
will  find,  even  in  such  a  purely  narrative  and  descrip 
tive  work  as  Hornaday's  Camp  Fires  in  the  Desert  and 
Lava,  written  after  a  trip  through  the  same  country 
hunting  for  mountain  sheep. 

"After  a  period  of  silence,  so  far  as  sending  any 
messages  to  the  outdoor  world  was  concerned,  Zane 
Grey  again  commenced  writing  sportsman's  articles 
for  us.  While  gathering  material  for  his  later  novels, 
which  have  occupied  his  time  exclusively,  nevertheless, 
he  was  able  to  get  much  sport  in  the  countries  visited, 
as,  when  not  at  work,  Zane  Grey's  play  is  the  life  of 
the  all-around  sportsman.  A  hunting  trip  for  puma  in 
Colorado,  a  spell  at  Catalina  fishing  for  the  leaping 
tuna  and  the  swordfish,  all  resulted  in  stories  for 
sportsmen,  relished  the  more  keenly  because  told  by 
a  master  in  literature.  While  our  people  have  little 
patience  with  the  author  who  attempts  to  write  on  the 
outdoors  when  he  himself  is  not  a  true,  tried  and 
experienced  sportsman,  we  accept  Zane  Grey  as  capable 


ZANE  GREY  247 

of  holding  his  own  with  the  best  of  us  in  the  world  of 
outdoor  sport,  regardless  of  his  abilities  as  a  writer. 
And  no  higher  praise  could  be  tendered  any  one  by  the 
isportsmen  themselves  than  to  regard  him  as  an  'old- 
timer' — one  of  themselves.  Such,  gentlemen,  is  Zane 
Grey!" 

Zane  Grey  was  born  in  Zanesville,  Ohio.  His  father 
was  a  backwoodsman,  hunter  and  farmer  in  his  earlier 
days,  and  later  became  a  doctor.  His  mother  was  a 
direct  descendant  of  the  famous  frontier  Zanes,  and 
there  is  Indian  blood  flowing  in  the  veins  of  the  Zanes. 
Educated  in  Zanesville  High  School  and  at  the  Uni 
versity  of  Pennsylvania,  young  Grey  always  was  fond 
of  books,  and  it  was  natural  that  his  inclination  ran 
toward  Cooper  and  Scott.  But  he  preferred  swimming 
and  fishing  and  hunting  to  school  or  work.  He  played 
amateur,  college  and  professional  baseball,  was  a  mem 
ber  of  the  famous  Orange  Athletic  Club  of  East 
Orange,  New  Jersey,  and  finally  became  a  professional 
ball  player  on  the  Newark  Eastern  League  team,  Find- 
lay  Tri-State  League,  and  Jackson  Michigan  League. 
Zane  Grey's  parents,  however,  persuaded  him  not  to 
go  into  major  league  baseball,  so  he  hunted  and  fished 
in  Ohio,  Michigan,  Pennsylvania,  New  York,  New 
Mexico,  Arizona,  California,  Lower  California, 
Mexico,  Yucatan,  West  Indies  and  Canada.  He 
canoed  down  many  rivers,  sought  the  black  sea-bass 
and  tuna  at  Catalina  Island  and  off  Coronada  in  the 
Pacific.  The  jungle  country  of  Terra  Caliento  of 
Mexico  lured  him,  as  did  the  coast  of  Yucatan  and  the 
Grand  Canyon  country. 


248   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

Zane  Grey  has  made  a  name  second  to  none  as  a 
writer  of  outdoor  romance  and  his  books  include: 

The  Desert  of  Wheat,  The  U.  P.  Trail,  The  Border 
Legion,  The  Heritage  of  the  Desert,  Ken  Ward  in  the 
Jungle,  The  Light  of  Western  Stars,  The  Lone  Star 
Ranger,  The  Rainbow  Trail,  Riders  of  the  Purple 
Sage,  Wildfire,  The  Young  Lion  Hunter,  The  Young 
Forester,  The  Young  Pitcher,  Desert  Gold. 

H.  W.  C 


CHAPTER  XLIV 

THOMAS  DIXON 

With  the  appearance  of  Leopard  Spots  about  fifteen 
years  ago,  the  powers  of  Thomas  Dixon  as  an  Ameri 
can  author  to  be  considered,  seized  the  American  read 
ing  public,  and  grew  steadily  with  increased  vigor  in 
The  One  Woman,  The  Clansman,  The  Traitor,  Com 
rades,  and  The  Root  of  Evil. 

Mr.  Dixon,  the  son  of  a  prominent  Baptist  clergy 
man  of  old  Revolutionary  stock,  was  born  in  Cleve 
land  County,  North  Carolina,  January  n,  1864.  Dur 
ing  his  childhood  spent  on  a  Southern  farm  in  the 
midst  of  the  magnetic  romanticism  of  the  land  of  the 
magnolia — in  the  very  throes  of  a  tremendous  conflict 
between  the  black  and  the  white — he  seems  to  have 
been  gleaning  much  with  which  he  has  given  charm 
to  the  stirring  picture  of  Dan  Norton.  At  the  age  of 
nineteen  he  was  graduated  from  Wake  Forest  College, 
of  his  native  State,  with  a  scholarship  admitting  him 
as  a  special  student  in  history  and  politics  at  Johns 
Hopkins  University.  In  '84,  the  following  year,  he 
became  a  law  student  at  Greensboro  Law  School, 
North  Carolina;  and  in  '86,  at  the  age  of  twenty-two, 
was  admitted  not  only  to  the  State  and  to  the  United 
States  district  courts  of  North  Carolina,  but  to  the 

249 


250   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

bar  of  the  United  States  Supreme  Court  at  Wash 
ington. 

Even  at  twenty  this  amazing  young  man  had  been 
elected  to  the  North  Carolina  Legislature.  For  two 
years  during  his  rapid  and  brilliant  career  as  a  law 
student,  he  was  actively  engaged  in  State  politics  and 
at  twenty-three  had  become  a  lawyer  of  note,  having 
appeared  in  two  famous  murder  cases  of  the  day. 

But  in  October,  1886,  Dixon  gave  up  his  work  in 
this  field  and  entered  the  ministry  as  pastor  of  the 
Baptist  Church  in  Raleigh,  from  which  he  accepted  a 
call  to  Boston  and  later  to  the  People's  Temple,  New 
York  City.  A  few  months  before  this  he  had  been 
married  to  Miss  Harriet  Bussey  of  Montgomery, 
Alabama. 

For  twelve  years,  until  1899,  Dixon's  great  orig 
inality,  freedom  of  expression,  fascinating  address,  and 
forcefulness  in  the  pulpit  drew  by  far  the  largest  audi 
ences  in  the  Protestant  congregation  of  Boston  and 
New  York.  As  a  minister,  independent,  assertive, 
strong  in  his  faith  and  unhampered  by  custom,  it  is 
said  he  was  not  averse  to  indulging  in  things  sup 
posedly  unclerical,  such  as  going  a-hunting  with  a  gun. 
Many  of  his  most  stirring  sermons  appear  in  the  books 
which  he  compiled  before  leaving  New  York — Living 
Problems  in  Religion  and  Social  Science  ( 1891 ) ,  What 
is  Religion?  (1902),  Sermons  on  Ing er soil  (1894), 
and  The  Failure  of  Protestantism  in  New  York 

(1897). 

Meanwhile,  Dixon's  meteoric  success  as  a  lawyer 
and  legislator,  his  power  in  the  pulpit,  his  brilliancy 
as  a  public  lecturer,  evidences  of  the  marvelous  capac- 


THOMAS  DIXON  251 

ity  of  the  man,  were  but  steps  in  the  development  of 
the  future  novelist.  For  real  success  he  looked  forward 
to  the  literary  and  waited  deliberately  until  almost  his 
fortieth  year  to  write  his  first  book  of  fiction. 

Then  from  the  fullness  of  his  varied  and  unique 
experience,  from  years  of  patient  study  of  the  great 
racial  tragedy  of  the  South,  from  the  strength  of  his 
endeavor  to  reveal  this  intense  situation  in  its  true 
light  to  the  millions  whose  sole  idea  of  the  negro  is 
vested  in  Mrs.  Stowe's  Uncle  Tom,  came  a  series  of 
striking  tales  of  American  life. 

Mr.  Dixon  then  struck  a  new  note  with  his  two 
great  novels  of  the  Civil  War — The  Southerner,  a 
story  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  and  The  Victim,  a  story 
of  Robert  E.  Lee.  These  books  were  even  more  suc 
cessful  than  his  earlier  volumes,  and  The  Southerner 
has  been  proclaimed  by  many  competent  critics  one  of 
the  best  novels  of  the-Civil  War  that  has  been  written. 

About  this  time  also  Mr.  Dixon's  previous  novel, 
The  Clansman,  was  produced  in  motion  pictures  under 
the  title  of  The  Birth  of  a  Nation  and  achieved  the 
greatest  success  which  has  ever  come  to  any  photoplay. 

Dixon' s  next  novel  was  called  The  Foolish  Virgin. 
It  is  a  powerful  study  of  an  unsophisticated  girl  who 
is  tricked  into  marriage  with  a  thief. 

This  was  followed  by  a  novel  called  The  Fall  of  a 
Nation,  which  was  written  in  connection  with  his  great 
motion  picture  production  of  the  same  name.  This 
story  was  the  means  of  arousing  hundreds  of  thou 
sands  of  Americans  to  great  outbursts  of  patriotism. 
With  all  the  fervor  and  thrills  that  characterized  The 
Birth  of  a  Nation,  Mr.  Dixon  here  tells  the  story  of 


252   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

the  invasion  of  the  United  States  by  a  powerful  Euro 
pean  nation. 

Mr.  Dixon's  latest  novel,  just  published,  is  called 
The  Way  of  a  Man.  It  is  the  story  of  the  type  of  the 
ultra-modern  woman  who  believes  that  woman  has 
now  reached  a  place  where  marriage  may  be  safely 
ignored. 

H.  W.  C. 


CHAPTER  XLV 

BASIL  KING 

The  Americanization  of  William  Benjamin  Basil 
King  gives  this  popular  writer,  born  in  Charlottestown, 
Prince  Edward  Isle,  1859,  his  rights  to  inclusion  in 
this  volume.  Basil  King,  as  he  is  popularly  known, 
was  educated  at  Canadian  schools  and  at  Kings  Col 
lege,  Windsor,  Canada.  His  wife  is  an  American. 
Mr.  King  is  an  Episcopal  clergyman  and -was  for  some 
time  rector  of  Christ  Church,  Cambridge,  Mass.  He 
has  lived  in  Boston  and  Cambridge  since  he  returned 
from  Europe,  where  he  spent  a  number  of  years  in 
France  and  Germany.  His  novel,  Let  No  Man  Put 
Asunder,  was  published  in  1901 ;  and  after  that  fol 
lowed  In  the  Garden  of  Chanty,  The  Steps  of  Honor, 
The  Giant's  Strength.  In  1908 — let  Mr.  King  tell  the 
story  in  his  own  words — "Harper's  wanted  my  book, 
The  Inner  Shrine,  to  publish  as  a  serial,  but  up  to 
that  time  they  had  never  taken  a  serial  except  from 
the  very  best  authors.  After  they  had -taken  the  works 
of  Thomas  Hardy,  Gilbert  Parker,  and  Mrs.  Deland, 
it  can  readily  be  seen  that  hesitation  on  their  part  to 
feature  a  serial  for  the  coming  year  by  a  man  who  was 
practically  unknown  was  natural.  It  was  suggested 
that  my  novel  be  run  serially,  but  anonymously.  At 
that  time  I  was  very  ill,  I  was  losing  my  sight  rapidly, 

253 


254   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

and  when  the  publishers  suggested  that  the  story  should 
be  printed  anonymously,  I  jumped  at  the  idea,  for  the 
simple  reason  that  this  would  allow  me  to  pass  along 
unmolested.  I  was  going  abroad  to  remain  two  years. 
I  was  so  ill  I  took  no  particular  interest  in  the  serial 
when  it  was  published,  and,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  I  did 
not  know  at  the  time  that  it  had  aroused  any  curiosity. 
I  had  very  little  communication  with  the  United  States 
during  the  first  year  of  my  stay  abroad.  The  Wild 
Olive  and  The  Street  Called  Straight  were  published 
anonymously,  too,  though  as  'by  the  author  of  The 
Inner  Shrine,'  but  now  the  authorship  of  them  is 
everybody's  secret,  in  a  way.  I  don't  mind.  Naturally, 
it  would  be  foolish  to  keep  up  my  anonymity  any 
longer,  though  I  should  have  been  glad  to  do  so." 

Later  novels  are  The  Lifted  Veil  and  The  High 
Heart,  The  Side  of  the  Angels,  The  Steps  of  Honor, 
The  Way  Home,  Abraham's  Bosom,  and  The  City  of 
Comrades. 

H.  W.  C. 


CHAPTER  XLVI 

PETER  B.    KYNE 

"Peter  B.  Kyne  is  one  of  those  dependable  mortals 
— one  of  those  who  can  be  depended  upon  always  to 
turn  out  a  good  job,  quite  according  to  specifications. 
So  it  is  that  the  reader,  running  over  the  titles  in  a 
book  store,  comes  to  a  volume  with  Kyne's  name  on 
it,  and  buys  it,  confident  that  it  may  not  be  an  epoch- 
making  story,  may  not  carry  any  extraordinary  mes 
sage,  may  not  excite  long,  windy  and  more  or  less 
intelligent  debate  in  the  literary  circles,  but  that  it  will, 
without  question  of  a  doubt,  be  a  good  story  and  well 
told.  Kyne  has  the  good  sense  to  write  about  things 
he  understands  clearly  and  the  lumber  trade  is  one 
of  them.  He  has  the  rare  ability  to  see  his  characters 
as  flesh  and  blood  people  and  he  has  the  trick,  pos 
sessed  by  all  too  few,  of  putting  these  characters,  still 
alive  and  human,  into  white  paper  and  ink."  In  this 
fashion  does  the  Brooklyn  Eagle  describe  the  writings 
of  Peter  B.  Kyne,  who  has  sometimes  been  called  the 
New  Jack  London. 

It  was  by  his  Cappy  Ricks  stories  that  Peter  B.  Kyne 
established  himself  with  the  thousands  of  readers  of 
the  Saturday  Evening  Post,  and  while  these  were  put 
into  book  form  at  a  later  date,  he  deserted  this  popular 
character  for  new  ones,  and  a  different  theme,  in  Web 
ster,  Man's  Man.  From  the  philosophic  adventurer 

255 


256   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

type  of  Cappy  Ricks,  Mr.  Kyne  went  to  a  typical  Jack 
London  person  in  his  John  Stewart  Webster,  mining 
engineer,  who  dipped  into  South  American  revolu 
tions  and  participated  in  "high  adventure"  that  cap 
tures  the  lover  of  the  five-reel  thriller. 

Dr.  Charles  H.  Shinn  finds  in  Kyne's  latest  book, 
The  Valley  of  the  Giants,  the  best  work  he  has  so  far 
done.  Here  Mr.  Kyne  selects  the  humble  county  coast 
of  California,  and  a  plot  not  unlike  Webster,  Man's 
Man. 

Peter  B.  Kyne  was  born  on  a  ranch  in  California 
in  1880.  He  served  in  the  Philippines  in  '98,  and  re 
cently  as  a  captain  in  the  I44th  Coast  Artillery.  Prior 
to  his  recognition  as  a  full-fledged  author,  he  has  been 
a  newspaper  man,  a  lumber  man,  a  railroad  man,  and 
a  miner. 

Doubleday,  Page  &  Company  recently  acquired  the 
rights  to  Mr.  Kyne's  earlier  books,  The  Long  Chance 
and  Cappy  Ricks. 

During  his  stay  in  France,  Captain  Kyne  adopted 
a  little  French  boy,  which  inspired  the  following  lines 
in  the  Chicago  Sunday  Tribune : 

Capt.  Peter  B.  Kyne, 

The  father  of  "Cappy  Ricks," 

Is  now  a  pa 

To  an  "oo-la-la" 

Whose  age  is  almost  six. 

"It's  this  way:  Capt.  Kyne  found  a  little  French 
boy  whose  father  had  been  killed  and  whose  mother 
had  died  and  who  had  absolutely  no  one  to  care  for 
him.  Cappy  Kyne  adopted  him,  and  when  he  came 
home  he  brought  his  new  son  with  him."  H.  W.  C. 


CHAPTER  XLVII 

EDGAR  WATSON   HOWE 

Ed  Howe,  as  he  is  everywhere  called,  was  born  at 
Treaty,  Indiana,  May  3,  1854,  the  son  of  Henry  and 
Elizabeth  (Irwin)  Howe.  Shortly  thereafter  his 
family  moved  to  Missouri  where  he  obtained  a  com 
mon  school  education.  At  twelve  years  of  age  he  en 
tered  a  printing  office,  and  at  nineteen  started  pub 
lishing  the  Golden  Globe,  at  Golden,  Colorado;  at 
twenty-one  he  married  Clara  L.  Frank,  of  Falls  City, 
Nebraska;  at  twenty-three  he  became  editor  and  pro 
prietor  of  the  Atchison  Daily  Globe,  of  Atchison,  Kan 
sas,  which  he  continued  to  publish  until  1911 ;  and  on 
January  i,  1911,  he  brought  out  the  first  number  of 
E.  W .  Howe's  Monthly.  He  has  also  written  some 
nineteen  volumes  of  travel,  biography,  philosophy  and 
short  stories.  He  is  an  exceedingly  acute,  shrewd 
small-town  person,  well  known  to  the  judicious  for 
his  Country  Town  Sayings;  but  .  .  . 

"Ed  Howe  is  in  Europe,"  I  was  informed  when  I 
went  in  search  of  material  for  this  essay.  I  decided 
that  Ed  Howe,  though  undoubtedly  interesting,  must 
be  consigned  to  that  oblivion  where  I  leave  all  those 
who  refuse  to  answer  my  letters.  Then,  in  the 
Literary  Digest  for  March  8,  1919,  I  came  upon  Mr. 
Howe  arguing  with  Frank  Harris,  editor  of  Pearson's, 

257 


258    THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

concerning  the  relative  merits  of  those  who  write  and 
those  who  build  their  houses,  for  comfort  and  con 
venience,  beside  the  sands  of  the  sea.  .  .  . 

"To  assert  that,  because  a  man  has  cleverness  as  a 
writer,  he  is  one  of  the  world's  great  men,  is,"  says  Mr. 
Howe,  "an  absurd  doctrine.  I  know  it  is  accepted  by 
writers,  but  it  is  certainly  nonsense.  And  I  will  go 
further  (attend  me  closely)  and  say  that  Shakespeare 
was  not  the  greatest  Englishman." 

Ed  Howe  (attend  him  closely!)  grows  exceeding 
rash,  n'cst-ce  pas?  But  we  must  quote  him  at  length 
to  prove  the  worth  of  his  thinking,  and  so  of  himself 
and  his  books. 

"Shakespeare,"  according  to  Mr.  Howe,  "was  born 
with  an  ability  to  write,  precisely,  as  a  hen  is  born 
with  an  ability  to  lay  a  certain  number  of  eggs"  .  .  . 
and  "there  are  half  a  dozen  Englishmen  living  to-day 
who  are  greater  than  Shakespeare;  who  acquired 
greatness  by  hard  and  patient  work,  which  Shake 
speare  never  did;  it  came  to  him  in  a.  flash,  and  he 
deserved  no  credit  for  it." 

You  will  notice  that  Mr.  Howe  is  proving  his  points 
by  citing  Shakespeare  who  is  dead  and  therefore  an 
easy  adversary;  you  will  also  notice  that  he  does  not 
name  his  "half  a  dozen  Englishmen" ;  and  you  may 
be  sure  that  he  can  point  to  no  "hard  and  patient  work" 
equaling  the  titanic  effort  required  to  produce,  in  rapid 
succession,  Hamlet,  Macbeth,  Othello,  Lear,  Antony 
and  Cleopatra,  A  Winter's  Tale,  The  Tempest.  In 
deed  the  strain  of  merely  playing  Hamlet  or  Lear 
equals  in  power  the  work  of  "half  a  dozen  English 
men,"  and  is  beyond  the  strength  of  all  but  two  or 


EDGAR  WATSON  HOWE  259 

three.  And  as  for  deserving  credit — Mr.  Howe  would 
credit  a  half  dozen  nameless  Englishmen  who  have 
helped  to  build  up  an  Empire  that  Germany  or  France 
or  these  United  States  can  at  any  moment  threaten, 
who  have  assembled  a  wealth  of  gold  and  silver  that 
may  be  eaten  by  rust,  destroyed  by  fire,  who  move 
among  flattering  sycophants  like  school  girls  at  a  vil 
lage  dance,  yet  would  deny  it  to  one  who  asked  of 
posterity  not  so  much  as  the  remembrance  of  his  name, 
whose  plays  are  credited  to  another,  who  gave,  in  re 
turn  for  the  begrudged  quiet  of  the  grave, — men 
quarrel  through  the  centuries  across  his  resting  place — 
Beatrice  and  Rosalind  and  Viola,  the  wit  and  beauty 
of  Portia,  the  loveliness  of  Imogen,  the  mirth  of  Fal- 
staff. 

But  Mr.  Howe  says  that  "his  greatness  was  not 
of  a  useful  kind,  whereas  the  greatness  of  many  other 
Englishmen  has  been  of  much  use  to  the  world." 

They  have  built  railroads,  mammoth  liners  plying 
across  the  seven  seas,  given  us  to  eat  and  drink; 
Shakespeare  has  supplied  only  that  food  by  which  the 
spirit  lives — not  bread.  "What  shall  it  profit  a  man," 
Christ  asked,  "if  he  win  the  whole  world  and  lose  his 
own  soul  ?"  But  Mr.  Howe  believes  that  the  man  who 
increases  the  creature  comforts  of  his  fellows  is  of 
more  use  to  the  world  than  the  man  like  Shakespeare 
or  the  prophet  like  Christ,  who  merely  saves  a  soul 
from  utter  material  degradation.  Mr.  Howe  prefers 
electric  lights  to  Twelfth  Night;  I  do  without  electric 
lights  and  find  the  Sonnets  very  useful  in  keeping  alive 
my  faith  in  humanity. 

"They  are  mere  entertainers,  as  are  strolling  players, 


260   THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

circus  performers  and  musicians  .  .  ."  says  Mr.  Howe 
of  those  who  write. 

To  be  kind,  I  take  it  that  Mr.  Howe  is  a  little  mad — 
and  not,  as  he  would  have  us  believe,  talking  in  all 
earnestness  of  Isaiah  and  Dante,  St.  John  the  Divine 
and  old  Sir  Thomas  Browne. 

"Do  we,  the  people,  get  our  morals  from  the 
writers  ?"  he  asks ;  and  answers,  "Certainly  not ;  so 
far  as  writers  teach  morals,  they  get  their  ideas  from 
the  people." 

As  is  proved  by  the  imprisonment  of  St.  Paul,  a 
writer,  made  popular  because  he  taught  the  ideas  of 
the  people;  as  is  proved  by  the  crucifixion  of  Christ. 
Like  Prodicos,  like  Anaxagoras,  like  Socrates,  Eurip 
ides  held  concerning  the  old  gods  of  Greece  opinions 
that  were  contrary  to  the  ancient  maxims  of  the  city 
of  Athens.  Everything  in  him  betrayed  contempt 
for  the  divine  and  heroic  conceptions  of  Hellas.  His 
was  the  modern  spirit,  something  sceptical  of  fairy 
tales.  At  last  it  became  necessary  that  he  flee  the 
city.  He  went  to  seek  under  a  tyrant  that  liberty  of 
thought  which  democracy  denied  him.  He  died  in  the 
royal  house  of  Archelaus.  .  .  . 

But  of  all  this,  as  of  Shakespeare,  Mr.  Howe  is 
ignorant,  for  "what,"  as  he  says,  "is  writing  but  a 
record  of  human  events?"  What  indeed  is  Homer 
but  just  that — the  history  of  the  Fall  of  Ilium  as  it 
was  duly  encompassed  by  the  Greeks?  And  the  truth 
of  the  fable  of  Don  Quixote  is  attested  by  the  passing 
of  an  out-grown,  ridiculous  chivalry. 

"What  is  written  philosophy,"  Mr.  Howe  continues, 
''but  the  teaching  of  our  oldest  and  best  men?" 


EDGAR  WATSON  HOWE  261 

Though  where  these  "oldest  and  best  men"  learned 
what  they  teach,  if  not  from  the  philosophers,  Mr. 
Howe  does  not  tell  us.  It  appears  that  "our  oldest 
and  best  men"  are  capable  of  thinking  things  out,  and 
that  philosophers,  having  no  such  capabilities,  hear 
ing  the  "oldest  and  best"  talk,  steal  their  thoughts  and 
write  them  down,  and  so  win  an  unearned  fame.  But 
Mr.  Howe,  doubtless  one  of  the  "oldest  and  best," 
angry  with  such  impostors,  tired  of  their  malfeasance, 
swears  that  .  .  . 

"The  teachings  of  Socrates  are  nothing  save  the  best 
teachings  of  those  with  whom  he  associated;  I  have 
read  his  philosophy" — meaning,  of  course,  that  he  has 
read  Plato — "and  it  imprest  me  not  as  new  doctrine, 
but  as  a  simple  repetition  of  what  I  have  heard  from 
the  best  of  my  associates  all  my  life." 

Unconsciously  Mr.  Howe  bears  witness  to  the  slow 
but  sure  potency  of  the  written  word.  After  twenty- 
four  centuries  the  teachings  of  Socrates  have  reached 
and  become  the  common  thought  of  those  with  whom 
Mr.  Howe  associates;  after  twenty-four  centuries  his 
doctrine  appears  as  nothing  new  to  Kansas  but  the 
simple  and  self-evident  truth.  This  speaks  volumes 
for  the  wisdom  of  Socrates  who,  with  his  life,  paid 
for  an  unshakeable  faith  in  those  doctrines  twenty- 
four  centuries  before  Mr.  Howe  ever  heard  of  them. 
Because  Socrates  alone  in  his  day  (with  no  asso 
ciates!)  knew  them  to  be  true  he  was  forced  to 
drink  the  hemlock.  It  was  hoped  that  with  his  death 
they  would  be  disproved  ...  or  forgotten  .  .  .  and 
now  they  crop  up  in  Kansas!  Can  nothing  be  done 
to  stifle  the  teachings  of  this  man  Socrates? 


262  THE  MEN  WHO  MAKE  OUR  NOVELS 

Mr.  Howe  closes  his  thoughtful  arraignment  of 
those  who  write  with  yet  another  question.  He  seems 
tireless,  a  catechist  after  the  heart  of  those  who  know 
their  catechism,  one  so  sure  of  our  answers  that  he 
does  not  even  wait  to  hear  them. 

"Did  Shakespeare,  or  Goethe,  or  Whitman,  or 
Buddha,  or  Tolstoy,  or  Confucius,  or  Rosseau,  teach 
you  as  important  lessons  as  you  learned  from  your 
parents?" 

And  so  he  leaves  us,  turning  abruptly  away. 
But  ... 

And  I  mean  no  disrespect  to  my  parents.  Pray  do 
not  misunderstand.  Yet  the  answer  is  most  certainly, 
Shakespeare  taught  me  vastly  more  than  ever  my 
father  did — indeed,  it  was  out  of  the  mouth  of  Shake 
speare  that  I  was  often  able  to  refute  my  father,  to 
make  him,  as  one  of  "the  oldest  and  best,"  see  the  light 
as  I,  one  in  love  with  Juliet,  saw  it  in  my  teens.  With 
out  Shakespeare  (and  Goethe  and  Whitman,  etc.)  we 
should  probably  be  no  wiser  than  is  Mr.  Howe. 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recall. 


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THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  UBRARY 


